Sally Gross

Sally Gross was born in 1953 in Cape Town

Gross was born on 22 August 1953 in Cape Town to a Jewish family. At birth she was classified as male and named Selwyn Gross. In 1993 she was formally diagnosed with an intersex variation and was then reclassified as female.

She was drawn to Catholicism and was baptized in 1976. A member of the African National Congress, she fled South Africa in 1977 on the advice of colleagues, moving to Botswana and then to Israel, where her parents lived. She gained Israeli citizenship but lost her South African citizenship, which was restored in 1991.

In 1981 she became a novice in the Dominican Order in Oxford. She was ordained a priest in 1987 and taught moral theology and ethics at Blackfriars in Oxford. She held a master's degree from Oxford University and in 1987 was a delegate at an ANC conference in Dakar.

In the early 1990s she left the Dominican Order and her clerical status was later removed. She later found a spiritual home among the Quakers and in Buddhism. After a long process, South Africa granted her documents with a female sex marker.

Gross founded Intersex South Africa. In 2000 she secured the inclusion of intersex in the definition of sex in South Africa's anti-discrimination law, and she took part in the first International Intersex Forum in 2011. She died in her apartment in Cape Town on 14 February 2014.