Content Advisory: Sexism / Genderism, Homophobia, Child Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Suicide / Suicidality, Medical Oppression, Health Struggles, Loss / Grief
Bo Laurent was born on August 14, 1956 in Kearney, New Jersey to a Catholic family. Born with ambiguous genitalia, doctors took three days to decide to label her male. At 18 months, a different set of doctors performed surgery to determine her sex, at which point they told her parents that she was “really” a girl and advised them to change her name and move to another town, keeping all of this secret, especially from her.
She grew up unhappy, in conflict with siblings and bullied at school while being brought in for annual visits to the pediatric endocrinology office at the hospital, but never told why. At age 10, Bo recognized that her romantic interest was toward girls. On the advice of a child psychiatrist, her parents told her about her clitoridectomy, and that she should never tell anyone about it. They did not tell her that she had been raised as a boy for a year and a half.
While she was in college at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Bo began searching for the medical records her family kept hidden. The roadblocks in her search coincided with her father’s death, and she went from being a successful student to failing out of college. She moved to San Francisco in her early 20s, and finally acquired 3 pages of her records from a gynecologist, uncovering the truth. What Bo read shocked her and filled her with shame.
She moved across the country to study math at MIT, graduated in 1983, then studied Japanese and moved to Japan, where she worked on research for machine translation of English to Japanese. When a romantic relationship fell apart in her mid-thirties, she had a nervous breakdown. Through therapy, she crafted a script to speak to her mother; she wanted to know what had happened, but more importantly, how people had felt about it and why they made the decisions they did. That conversation was so traumatic that they never spoke again.
Once back in the US, Bo sought fuller understanding of her identity by contacting academics, other intersex peers, and a PhD Program at the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. Bo founded the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) in 1993 to protect the human rights of people born with intersex variations — the first organization for intersex people.
Bo started using the name Cheryl Chase, and has been published under both names. In her work with ISNA, she co-produced a 30-minute documentary film capturing a conversation at the “world’s first intersex retreat”, titled Hermaphrodites Speak! (1997). As editor of the ISNA journal and newsletter, Hermaphrodites with Attitude, she amplified the voices of intersex activists.
In 1998, Bo wrote an amicus brief to the Colombian constitutional court regarding surgery on two children with intersex conditions. Colombia became the first nation in the world to impose legal regulations on intersex surgeries on the basis of human rights. In 2000, the International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Commission recognized the work of ISNA by awarding them the Felipa de Souza Award. ISNA also developed a comprehensive clinical handbook for doctors and parents, worked to change textbooks about human sexuality, and helped train intersex youth to become activists before the organization sunsetted in 2008.
Reflecting at the end of her OUTWORDS interview on what has kept her alive, Bo shares, “I wanted to get back as much of the richness of life that I think was my birthright as I could, and I wanted to get that for children born after me.”
