Watching the movie of the moment, ‘Conclave’, reminded me of my friend, the late Sally Gross.
Sally is no longer with us but I suspect she would have enjoyed the film, even though the truly remarkable story of her life would have made an even more incredible movie.
Revered internationally for her pioneering work, Sally was described on her death as ‘a radical and revolutionary South African activist’ in The Feminist Wire.
I first encountered Sally when she approached the journalism ethics charity MediaWise in the summer of 1996. As both a journalist and the director, it was my job to assist those with complaints about inaccurate, unethical or intrusive stories in the print or broadcast media. Sally alerted me to a prurient and inaccurate newspaper story that had appeared about her in a national Sunday paper. The piece was entitled ‘Priest in sex swap’, The People (4/8/1996).
Listening to her deep booming voice, it took me a while to come to terms with the story that I was hearing, especially as the predicament she described originated in Blackfriars, the Dominican Priory in Oxford, with which I had links stretching back 30 years.
She had been turfed out of the preaching Order where she had been a respected theologian as Fr Selwyn Gross OP and where she promoted interfaith dialogue. After revealing concerns about suspected ‘hermaphroditism’, Fr Gross was sent first to the Cambridge Priory and then told to leave the Order and try to ‘live as a woman’.
She moved to Brighton to start life again in her newly ascribed role where an indignant Catholic passed her details to the press.
Sally was born with the name Shlomo, on 22 August 1953 in Cape Town to Jewish parents in apartheid South Africa. Her sex was indeterminate at birth and, as was often the case at the time, doctors ascribed a male gender to the intersex infant.
Brought up as a boy, Selwyn as he was later known, became involved in clandestine anti-apartheid activities. He went to study in Israel and returned preoccupied with politics and spirituality. He joined the African National Congress (ANC) and converted to Catholicism, spending three years in exile in Botswana and Israel where he took out citizenship, having been stripped of his South African passport.
Inspired by radical Dominicans, he joined the Order in 1981 and studied for the priesthood. He attended the talks in July 1987 between the Institute for Democratic Alternatives in South Africa (IDASA) and the ANC that produced the Dakar Declaration. On his return from Senegal he was ordained as Fr Selwyn Gross OP and came to England.
For five years his inner torment about his puzzling condition took second place to his work and studies. When he did seek advice he was told it was virtually inoperable and that he should more properly have been allocated the female gender at birth.
Advised to undergo hormone therapy, Selwyn, now 40, began to live a new life as a woman. The Israeli Ministry of the Interior corrected her birth details from Shlomo to Shlomit in February 1994, by which time she had been issued a UK passport as Sally Gross. The Dominican Order, however, was not so understanding.
Unaware that the Dominicans had asked the Pope to rescind her status as a priest, Sally was fearful of the publicity that might be generated if word got out that the Catholic Church had ordained a woman. Immersed in her work, she kept herself to herself, but when a research contract finished, she became dependent upon benefits.
None of this appeared in The People story, of course. Riddled with factual inaccuracies, some of which endangered Sally’s right to claim benefits, the story made her new status seem sleazy. The journalists were oblivious to the truly sensational story they were missing.
With help from MediaWise, Sally tried to set the record straight through the Press Complaints Commission (PCC). In a correspondence that dragged on for nine months, she had to supply forensic details about her circumstances that the press had no right to know.
In May 1997 the PCC ruled that The People had not breached the Editors’Code of Conduct on accuracy or harassment and offered the paper a public interest defence which the paper had not even claimed. To add insult to injury the PCC decided to publish no details of her complaint on the grounds that it ‘would not be helpful to Miss Gross’.
Sally challenged their ruling, but the PCC finally washed their hands of her a full year after the offending article first appeared.
Keen to promote better understanding of the issues all this had raised, Sally joined me on a MediaWise ethics roadshow to university journalism courses. Speaking under ‘privileged’ conditions she explained intersex, described how damaging an inaccurate story can be, and pointed out that reporters bent on sleaze had missed out on what could have been a career-changing world exclusive. Her ordeal was not yet over. One budding tabloid student hack breached her confidentiality and sold information to the press.
I urged Sally to apply her considerable intellectual talents to writing a book linking her circumstances to her theological, philosophical and political concerns. Instead, and against my advice, she supplied The People with an account of her ‘journey’. This time all they ran was a short piece critical of her treatment by the Catholic Church alongside a sensational photo spread about a ‘sex tourist’ vicar who had been arrested in flagrante with a young boy. The Anglican Church was criticised for meeting the paedophile’s legal costs.
painted by Gabrielle Le Roux, 2013
Devastated by this latest betrayal, Sally quit the country. Back in South Africa she became an internationally acknowledged advocate for openness about intersex, and a respected human rights activist. Sally’s words, in an interview still accessible on You Tube, might well have been an inspiration for the extraordinary intervention of Cardinal Benitez at a key moment in ‘Conclave’.
“Be proud of what you are. Don’t be afraid of what you are. Accept yourself and others too will accept you. Our world is changing. We together, if we struggle and if we stand firm, can change it. It gets better.”
Sally won many friends for her ground-breaking work in South Africa, challenging the taboos that had blighted her life and that of many others. She died in penury having exhausted herself and her funds in her life’s mission. Her experience is a reminder never to forget all those vilified by the press for ‘being different’ and the countless others who have been shunned, harmed, or even slain on account of their sexuality.
It is to be hoped that the awards being showered on ‘Conclave’ and ‘Emilia Pérez’ will prompt similar messages of support and solidarity.
