Sean Saifa Wall (he/him/his) is a Black queer intersex activist and rising scholar.

Born and raised in the Bronx, Saifa attended Williams College, where he received a Mellon Mays Undergraduate fellowship to research topics such as The Social Origins of Hip Hop and Black middle-class gentrification in Harlem. Since graduating from Williams, he has worked on several research projects that amplify the voices of queer, transgender, and people of colour communities. In 2024, he received his PhD as a Marie Skłowdoska-Curie fellow at the University of Huddersfield in England, where his research examined the erasure of intersex people from social policy sectors in Ireland and England. 

Saifa is committed to racial equity and a radical vision of bodily autonomy for people with intersex variations. He made history by confronting the surgeon on ABC News Nightline who performed his gonadectomy at the age of 13.

Saifa is also co-founder of the Intersex Justice Project, whose #EndIntersexSurgery campaign pressured Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago to become the first children’s hospital in the United States to denounce and further investigate genital surgeries on Intersex infants. The Google/Stink Films documentary Stonewall Forever documents the campaign. His other features include The Huffington Post, Scientific American, NBC, Afropunk: Solutions Sessions, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics, The Washington Blade, The Guardian, and The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Healthcare, and his TEDx talk, “36 Revolutions of Change.”

Saifa is the former Board President of interACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth and a former advisor to the Astraea Intersex Fund for Human Rights. Above all else, Saifa is determined to end harmful and invasive genital surgery on intersex children and advocate for affirming healthcare for all people with intersex variations. Saifa is now collaborating on another initiative emerging from IJP, Strategy Lab for Intersex Movements or SLIM. In addition to his work and activism, he is a loving dad to his dog, Justice. He is currently working on a documentary about his father’s incarceration entitled “Letters to an Unborn Son.”

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