Sally Gross

Background

Gross was born on 22 August 1953 to a Jewish family, classified as male, and named Selwyn Gross.

Career

Although aware of her genital ambiguities, she was only formally diagnosed as having an intersex variation in 1993 at age 40. She was subsequently reclassified as female. She was ordained a deacon in "around 1985" and a priest in 1987, and then taught moral theology and ethics at Blackfriars in Oxford.

She holds a Masters degree from Oxford University.

In 1987, Gross served as a delegate in an African National Congress conference, headed by Thabo Mbeki, in Dakar, Senegal. She was invited to teach in South Africa by the Dominicans once the South African ban on the African National Congress was lifted in 1990.

Gross gained Israeli citizenship but lost her South African citizenship during her time as a refugee, which was restored in 1991. A year later, her clerical status was stripped and she considered herself removed from communion with the Church.

Her return to South Africa was complicated by a loss of citizenship during the apartheid era, and her change of sex classification.

Granted a passport with a male sex descriptor in 1991, her requests for a passport with a female sex descriptor were passed around the South African Home Affairs and Health Departments. Gross rejected a suggestion of "genital "disambiguation" surgery" as "an immoral suggestion". Eventually she was granted a passport and a birth certificate with female sex markers, on the basis of a mistaken original classification.

In 2000, Sally secured the first known mention of intersex in national law, with the inclusion of "intersex" within the definition of "sex" in the anti-discrimination law of the Republic of South Africa.

Since then, she helped to draft legislation on the Alteration of Sex Descriptors, and the Promotion of Equality. Gross was a public speaker on intersex issues, and she was interviewed by the British Broadcasting Corporation World Service on intersex and the Caster Semenya affair in September 2009.

She appears in a video for lieutenant Gets Better South Africa in April 2013. Gross also participated in the first International Intersex Forum in 2011 and appears in the documentary Intersexion.

Via Skype, Gross presented a paper entitled "Not in God"s Image: Intersex, Social and Infanticide" to a conference on Intersex, Theology and the Bible in March 2013 by the Manchester University Religion and Civil Society Network.

Achievements

• Gross was a founder of Intersex South Africa, an autonomous intersex community organisation affiliated with Organisation Intersex International.

Politics

A member of the African National Congress during the apartheid era, and the founder of Intersex South Africa, Gross acted as a mentor to intersex activists around the globe.

Connections

Friend:

Trust Aotearoa