According to The New York Times, her parents originally named her Brian Sullivan, noting that "Chase is XX, and the reason for her intersex condition has never been fully understood.

"[2] Other sources state her original name was Charlie,[3][4] since until recently Chase preferred to use pseudonyms when referring to her early life.

Chase told Salon she was born with "mixed male/female sex organs"[5] and after the discovery of ovaries and a uterus, a clitoridectomy was performed to remove her larger clitoris when she was aged 18 months.

She then studied Japanese at Harvard Extension School[2] and at the Intensive Summer Language Institute of Middlebury College, which was founded by Congregationalists.

In 1993, via a letter to the editor published in The Sciences July/August issue, she founded the now defunct Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) by fiat and asked for people to write to her under her new name, Cheryl Chase, the beginning of the movement to protect the human rights of people born with intersex conditions in the U.S.[13] In the 1990s, she began using the names Bo Laurent and Cheryl Chase simultaneously, sometimes in the same publication.

(1995), a 30-minute documentary film in which several intersex people discuss the psychological impact of their conditions and the medical treatment and parenting they received,[15] and the editor of the journal Hermaphrodites with Attitude.

In 2004, Chase and the ISNA persuaded the San Francisco Human Rights Commission to hold hearings on medical procedures for intersex infants.

In August 2006, Pediatrics published a letter signed by 50 international experts, including Chase, titled "Consensus Statement on the Management of Intersex Disorders".