“Much needs to be done to educate the public about intersex. They need to learn that it is part of the fabric of human diversity and not a threat, a rights issue and not pathology.” - Sally Gross
Born in apartheid-era South Africa, Sally Gross was a trailblazing figure whose life journey intertwined profound personal struggles, groundbreaking activism, and deep spiritual exploration. Much of her life was shaped by her intersex identity, as well by her commitment to social justice and her unwavering fight for equality. Gross’ complex and often arduous journey took her from her early embrace of Catholicism and anti-apartheid activism to a path of exile and eventual return to South Africa, where she became a vital voice for intersex rights. Her work not only helped to transform South African legal frameworks but it also inspired and sparked global awareness around intersex issues and intersex rights. Despite facing rejection from the Church, financial hardship, and profound personal challenges, Gross remained steadfast in her advocacy and left an indelible mark on both the intersex community and the broader human rights landscape. Her story is one of resilience, courage, and a relentless pursuit of justice, and her warm and gentle spirit in the face of perpetual adversity is one worthy of both study and praise.
On August 22nd, 1953, Sally Gross was born to a Jewish family in Wynberg, a southern suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. At birth, Gross was classified as male and was thus raised as such, while also being brought up in the Orthodox Jewish faith. From a young age, however, Gross was both drawn to Catholicism and began to question her gender ambiguities. By the early 1970s, she had fully embraced Roman Catholicism and in early 1976 was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. It would take much longer, however, for Gross to sort out and come to terms with her gender.
In her youth, Gross also became increasingly politically active and vocally promoted her anti-apartheid stances. In 1977, she drafted a paper in response to the recent Soweto Riots, which included provisions for armed struggle and cooperation with the then-banned African National Congress (ANC). When a copy of the draft went missing, Gross was urged to flee the country by her colleagues in the African National Congress as a precaution to save her life. In May of 1977, Gross fled South Africa as a political refugee, briefly landing in Botswana before moving to Israel, where her parents had previously settled. While there, Gross attended the University of Haifa for two years and became an Israeli citizen, though she lost her South African citizenship during the ordeal. Gross next headed to Oxford, England where by 1981 she had joined the Oxford Priory of the English Province of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans).
In 1985, Gross was officially ordained as a deacon, and by 1987 had advanced to the role of priest. During this time period, Gross still identified as male, which made her ability to rise in the ranks of the church possible. While working as a priest, Gross also started teaching moral theology and ethics at Blackfriars in Oxford and received a master’s degree from Oxford University. In 1987, Gross also reconnected with her political ties to South Africa when she served as a delegate at an ANC conference led by Thabo Mbeki and held in Dakar, Senegal. Gross was then invited to teach in South Africa by the Dominicans, and she decided she would eventually make the return to her homeland once the South African ban on the ANC had been lifted in 1990.
It is around this time period, however, when Sally also began to further explore the questions she had surrounding her body and her gender. She took a leave of absence from the Dominican Order and briefly moved to Eastbourne, England with the intent to do some soul-searching. She initially approached her gender exploration from a transgender paradigm, but eventually started working with a counselor who suggested that Gross may have been born intersex. Gross then pivoted to look into this possibility and eventually had this confirmed via testosterone testing. In 1993, at the age of 40, Gross was officially diagnosed as intersex and was then reclassified as female.
Once back in South Africa, Sally began studying law at The University of Cape Town (UCT) and officially joined the ANC, becoming an active player in left-wing politics. While she had physically returned to live in South Africa, her path to regaining her South African citizenship was made complicated both by her status as a political refugee during the apartheid era but more importantly due to the change of her sex classification from male to female. She was initially granted a new passport with a male sex descriptor in 1991, but she persistently made numerous requests for a passport with a female sex descriptor. For years, her requests were passed around the South African Home Affairs and Health Departments, which crudely responded with suggestions that Sally get “genital disambiguation surgery.” Eventually, Gross was able to successfully lobby for a new passport and birth certificate with female sex markers on the basis of a mistaken original classification at birth, and her South African citizenship was restored.
While Gross was able to regain citizenship as a woman , her new identification challenged the stringent gender roles of the Church, and within a year she was stripped of her clerical status entirely. Gross was deeply pained by this event and considering herself removed from communion with the Church, lamented in writing that she was “not able to satisfy the divine criterion for humanness, which requires that one objectively be either determinately male or determinately female.” Gross continued: “It follows that, like dogs, cats and tins of tuna, I am not the kind of thing which could have been baptized validly. I presume that this is not the official view of the Church into which I was baptized as a young adult almost twenty years before either the Church or I realized that my anatomy was way beyond the tolerances of ‘industry-standard’.”
Being abruptly cast aside by an organization that had been such a significant part of her life drove Gross into financial hardship, severe depression, and even to the brink of suicide. She vigorously sought to overcome these challenges and eventually found spirituality through Buddhism and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Nevertheless, Gross never fully recovered from this utter rejection from the Church, and later told Intersex Human Rights Australia: “Rejection by my Order and the Roman Curia still hurts, and I still miss religious life…I sent a formal letter to the Roman Curia to protest at the dishonesty with which I was handled. I felt bound to express some outrage while seeking closure. Unsurprisingly, there was no response.”
Gross bounced back in part by actively throwing herself into becoming an intersex advocate. She started speaking out against the practice of “corrective surgery” on intersex children, which eventually became known as either medically unnecessary surgeries or sex-normalizing surgeries. Gross also founded the groundbreaking Intersex South Africa, an autonomous intersex community organization that became affiliated with the Organisation Intersex International (OII), a global advocacy and support group for people with intersex traits. Then in the year 2000, Gross became the first person in the world to successfully secure the inclusion of the term “intersex” within the definition of "sex" in the anti-discrimination laws of the Republic of South Africa, thereby creating the first national constitution ever to be fully intersex inclusive. Although South Africa’s Constitution at the time had been one of the most progressive in the world when it came to protecting the rights of all persons, Gross had uncovered the fact that the word ‘person’ in legal terminology applied only to those who were born unambiguously male or female. Gross then continued to exert political influence, contributing to the drafting of significant legislation including the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act in 2000 and the Alteration of Sex Description and Sex Status Act in 2003. The latter of these is what officially enabled intersex and trans people in South Africa for the first time to be able to legally change their “sex descriptors” in their identity documents should they so choose.
Gross poignantly reflected in her writing around this time: “When a baby is born, the first question customarily asked is whether it is a baby boy or a baby girl. In most cases, the question can be answered easily after a glance between the new-born baby’s legs. In some cases, however, it is not straight-forward, usually because the external genitals of the baby are ambiguous…In our societies, sadly, there is profound ignorance about intersex. Those found to be intersexed are deeply stigmatized, and being intersexed can have lethal consequences…The propensity to see people who are intersexed as monsters is often considered to be something dictated by the very order of nature. It is not, any more than the North American lust for iPods is part of the natural order. Attitudes towards intersexuality and the intersexed have differed historically in different cultural contexts and in different times. This tells us that these attitudes are a matter of culture rather than of nature.”
Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Gross continued to be an untiring public advocate for intersex awareness, and she dedicated much of her time towards advising and mentoring fellow intersex individuals and activists. She participated in the first International Intersex Forum, held in Brussels in 2011. She was frequently interviewed about major intersex issues like the Caster Semenya affair in 2009, which brought much more global awareness to intersex matters. Sally also served as an active online presence on various intersex support and advocacy forums and appeared in the landmark 2012 documentary Intersexion, which interviewed and portrayed the lives of intersex people around the world. As Maureen Isaacson noted in writing for the Daily Maverick: “Sally Gross urged intersex people to speak out because it was ‘much, much better to be in a position to present oneself as oneself’.” Gross spent much of her later years tirelessly penning papers, giving lectures, participating in conferences, and fearlessly advocating for better awareness of and education around the intersex community.
Despite her utter devotion towards what was largely selfless community work, Gross was increasingly forced to rely on friends for financial support to help cover her rent as well as her medical expenses once her health started to decline. She eventually became practically immobile and in 2009, wrote about the physical toll her work had taken on her body: “Several lifetimes worth of experience are packed into 56 years, and perhaps my health problems reflect this. My body is like a car, which bears the marks of heavy and productive use.” Then in early 2014, news outlets began reporting that Gross had been found alone in her Cape Town apartment on the 14th of February, having tragically passed away in solitude several days prior. Upon learning of her death, friends, fellow community members, and numerous activist organizations around the world mourned Gross’ untimely passing and an outpouring of both grief and gratitude for her life’s work ensued.
Morgan Carpenter, the president of Organisation Intersex International (OII) Australia recounted to the Star Observer how important of a figure Gross had been in both the intersex movement and in the campaign to remove apartheid in South Africa, calling Gross a “courageous and ground-breaking campaigner, who felt the rejection of the church of which she was an active part,” and adding that “Sally will be missed also for her warmth, gentleness and spirit.” A public memorial was held for Gross in Cape Town on the 26th of February, while several international intersex activists around the world responded to her loss by running campaigns and fundraisers in her memory to provide support for other activists in the future who might similarly find themselves without recourse.
After Sally’s passing, the integral work of her organization Intersex Society of South Africa largely also disappeared, which fellow South African intersex activist Nthabiseng Mokoena declared was a major flaw in the country’s NGO politics. Mokoena noted how crucial organizations like these were usually run by only one or two people, and so if one person left or passed away, then the NGO itself would also vanish. Nevertheless, the work and writings that Gross did manage to leave behind around intersex awareness and equality have proven to be indispensable to future generations of intersex individuals, who Gross often encouraged by saying: “Hang on in there, be proud of what you are, don’t be afraid of what you are, our world is changing. It gets better.”
Writing elsewhere for OII, Morgan Carpenter continued to reflect on Sally Gross’ life and legacy: “In a sense, the intersex community became her congregation, where she continued to live out her vocation, and where she was surrounded by people she loved right to the end. We were very lucky to have known her. Even towards the end, Sally was more concerned about others than herself, but she was very grateful for all the work being done by those trying to find ways to help and support her during her last days...For so many of us in this community, who knew her in the flesh or online, it is very sad that she has passed away like this; she was a gentle and yet powerful person, one of life’s great souls, a very spiritual person, someone who did not judge, looked for the best in people, and was always more interested in others than herself. Such people are rare, and a privilege to know in any capacity. We were blessed to have had her as part of this community, and she is a treasure who will be sorely missed.” In a written eulogy for QSpirit, Michael Worsnip, a fellow queer priest and lifelong friend of Sally’s, added to these sentiments and perhaps summarized Sally Gross best: “Sally could be incandescent. You certainly could not ignore her.”
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material
Adams, M. (2024). Sally Gross: LGBTQ+ History Month. Q Christian Fellowship. https://www.qchristian.org/blog/sally-gross
Cherry, K. and Worsnip, M. (2024). Remembering Sally Gross, Incandescent Intersex Trailblazer: “You Certainly Could Not Ignore Her.” QSpirit. https://qspirit.net/sally-gross-intersex-trailblazer/
Coan, S. (2000). The Journey from Selwyn to Sally. The Natal Witness. https://www.news24.com/Archives/Witness/The-journey-from-Selwyn-to-Sally-20150430
Cornwall, S (ed). (2016). Intersex, Theology, and the Bible: Troubling Bodies in Church, Text, and Society. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.
Isaacson, M. (2014). Sally Gross: The Fight for Gender Equality Loses a Giant. The Daily Maverick. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2014-02-25-sally-gross-the-fight-for-gender-equality-loses-a-giant/
Le Roux, G. (2014). A Tribute to Sally Gross. The Feminist Wire. https://thefeministwire.com/2014/02/tribute-sally-gross/
Mokoena, N. (2016). Remembering Sally, and The Intersex Movement in South Africa. Intersex Day. https://intersexday.org/en/remembering-sally-south-africa/
Ozturk, S. (2014). Sally Gross Remembered as Fearless Intersex Leader. Star Observer. https://www.starobserver.com.au/news/international-news-news/sally-gross-remembered-as-fearless-intersex-leader/118968
Swarr, A.L. (2023). Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wilson, G. (2011). Eighth Day of Intersex: Sally Gross. Intersex Human Rights Australia. https://ihra.org.au/15234/eighth-day-intersex-sally-gross/