Cary Gabriel Costello

Cary Gabriel Costello is an intersex trans male professor and advocate for transgender and intersex rights. His areas of study include identity, sexuality, privilege, and marginalization.

Career and personal life

Assigned female at birth, Costello first attempted a gender transition in 1991, while working as an attorney in Washington, D.C. Due to the discrimination he experienced, he postponed his transition, and left the legal profession to pursue a degree and career in sociology.

Costello has advocated for transgender and intersex people on issues including intersex surgery, eugenics, bathroom bills, and the sometimes fraught relationships between intersex and transgender communities. He has analyzed the controversy over the gender testing of South African athlete Caster Semenya from an intersex perspective. Costello has suggested using the term ipso gender instead of cisgender for intersex people who agree with their medically assigned sex.

Costello has a daughter, and is married to an intersex trans woman.

In February 2017, Costello and his wife lost access to transition-related healthcare when the state of Wisconsin reinstated an exclusion on these services. Additionally, his employer required that he obtain and submit new proof of his gender identity, despite the fact that he had transitioned over a decade earlier. A blog post Costello wrote about the situation went viral.

Selected publications