Cheryl Chase is a woman who was born with female genes and an enlarged clitoris that made her genitals look masculine. In 1956, when Chase was born, doctors couldn't tell if she was a boy or a girl. They labeled Chase as male, and her parents named and raised their child as Charlie. Eighteen months later, though, doctors consulted as a second opinion decided Chase was a girl with an oversized clitoris. They convinced her parents to have it excised, to change Charlie's name to Cheryl, and to raise her as a girl in a new town where nobody knew them.

Although she always saw herself as female, the surgery left Chase with still-unusual looking genitals, a permanent loss of sexual sensation, and inability to reach orgasm. Her parents had been promised that the surgery would make Chase a well-adjusted, ordinary, heterosexual woman. Instead, Chase, in her own words, "grew up quite smart, but depressed, isolated, socially inept and lesbian." Chase founded the Intersex Society of North America, which condemns surgery that is not medically necessary for children, as well as the shame and secrecy that typically surrounds it. The organization has 700 funding donors and a Web site that gets about 1,800 individual visitors a day.