Sally Gross

Sally Gross (born Selwyn Gross; 22 August 1953 – 14 February 2014) was an anti-apartheid and intersex activist. A member of the African National Congress during the apartheid era, She was subsequently reclassified as female.

Spirituality, refugee status, and early works Although born to a Jewish family, Gross was drawn to Catholicism and was baptised in early 1976. She fled South Africa in May 1977, on the advice of colleagues in the African National Congress, moving to Botswana and then later to Israel where her parents had settled, before becoming a novice in the Dominican Order in Oxford, England, in 1981. She was ordained a deacon in "around 1985" and a priest in 1987, A year later, her clerical status was stripped and she considered herself removed from communion with the Church. Granted a passport with a male sex descriptor in 1991, her requests for a passport with a female sex descriptor were passed around the South African Home Affairs and Health Departments. Gross rejected a suggestion of "genital "disambiguation" surgery" as "an immoral suggestion". an autonomous intersex community organisation affiliated with Organisation Intersex International.

In 2000, Sally secured the first known mention of intersex in national law, She appears in a video for It Gets Better South Africa in April 2013. Gross also participated in the first International Intersex Forum in 2011 and appears in the documentary Intersexion. Via Skype, Gross presented a paper entitled "Not in God's Image: Intersex, Social Death and Infanticide" to a conference on Intersex, Theology and the Bible in March 2013 by the Manchester University Religion and Civil Society Network. In obituaries by Organisation Intersex International, Intersex Trust Aotearoa New Zealand and the Star Observer newspaper, Gross is remembered as a gentle and fearless advocate, and a mentor.