Some of Tiger Devore’s earliest memories are of pediatric wards where “we were all stuck in our cribs; we didn’t really talk to each other.” Tiger went on to dedicate their life to ensuring that suffering people could talk to one another, to understand what was happening to them and control their own treatment.

Tiger (he/they) was born in Los Angeles in 1958 with severe hypospadias, which in his case meant his urethra opening was at the base of his penis rather than the tip. Tiger’s doctors assigned them male and operated on their penis to extend the urethra to the tip so he could urinate standing up. The failure of this procedure led to many subsequent “corrective” genital surgeries, 24 in total, into adulthood. He eventually petitioned Kaiser Permanente for his medical records, which gave him “a much clearer picture of just how the doctors were literally experimenting on me…because they really didn’t know what they were doing.”

As Tiger was suicidal by adolescence, their parents reluctantly agreed to hire a psychiatrist. Despite the therapist’s lack of intersex knowledge, Tiger credits him with keeping them alive and inspiring them to pursue psychology as an adult. When therapy failed to “cure” Tiger’s homosexuality and his father kicked him out of the house at age 19, an older man named Durk Dehner took Tiger under his wing, introducing him to the LA leather scene and helping him get a job at The Advocate.

Tiger relocated to the San Francisco Advocate office in 1978 and got heavily involved in activism against the anti-gay Briggs Initiative. When the AIDS epidemic arrived a few years later, Tiger recalls, “I lost all my friends and I was alone. People told me to make new friends and I made new friends and all of them died.” One of his most vivid memories of the time was all the medical misinformation going around, leading to brutal divides even within the gay community.

Tiger went on to get his PhD in Sexology at Johns Hopkins, where he interned under renowned sex researcher John Money. Money gave him his earliest opportunities to talk about being intersex on television, most notably with Oprah Winfrey in 1984. It was a challenging encounter: Winfrey and her co-interviewer interrupted Tiger constantly and asked inordinately sexual questions. But Tiger realized the value of being a public figure unashamedly discussing this subject, particularly for intersex people or parents of young intersex children who might be watching, and continued appearing on talk shows and documentaries.

This visibility spawned one of Tiger’s defining partnerships when a suicidal Bo Laurent was referred to Tiger, now a therapist, as a patient in 1992. Laurent had also been subject to multiple early surgeries to “correct” her intersex variation. Citing studies of the benefits that mutual support networks accorded to breast cancer patients, he proposed she channel her anguish into establishing something similar for intersex people. Inspired, Laurent founded the Intersex Society of North America. As Tiger puts it now, “Intersex kids were always separated from each other, were never allowed to exchange information. Me going on TV and then [Laurent] taking up that mantle and creating the Intersex Society of North America changed everything.”

Tiger later returned to San Francisco, where they set up their own successful sex therapy practice, and eventually retired to Las Vegas. As he reflects now, “I’ve been taught many, many, many times that telling my story saves lives and gives people the chance to have a good life as opposed to ending the one that they’re in. That’s worth it.”

Bio Author: Mac Rogers