Quantum, Neuro, Intersex: The Non-Binaries

A transcript of a Living Room Session by the House of Beautiful Business

The world has always been fluid. It’s time we become fluid, too — in our thinking, reacting, responding to those in need, and even in our hopes for the future. To help us move beyond reflexive, traditional thinking in binaries, and to learn more, we hosted a virtual Living Room Session on “Quantum, Neuro, Intersex: The Non-Binaries.” Below is an edited transcript of that session.

We talked to Alicia Roth Weigel, an intersex activist and policy, advocacy, and campaign strategist working to improve the landscape for marginalized populations; Ian McDonald, CTO-in- Residence at Microsoft for Startups and advocate for neurodiversity in hiring, and Alissa Wilms, quantum computing scientist at Porsche Digital and former actress. We asked them the question: What can we learn from a non-binary perspective? What has not fitting into the usual categories done for you personally and professionally, and what does that imply for our hopes of a better future?

We began our conversation with Alicia, who shared her personal story and experiences as a policy maker and activist for the rights of children born with intersex traits like herself.

Alicia Weigel: For those who are not familiar with the word, intersex is more of an umbrella term, and it refers to the almost 2% of the world’s population that is born between what is considered biologically male and female. There’s this old-school binary thinking that XX means woman XY means man. When really, there’s a wide variety of different chromosomal patterns, so we have folks that have XxY chromosomes or XxYX. And even beyond the chromosomes, all of our bodies respond to hormones and androgens in the womb differently, and develop in different ways. We end up with this broad spectrum of both internal and external sex traits.

So for me, I have XY chromosomes. When my mom did an amniocentesis test during her pregnancy with me, my parents were told that I had XY chromosomes. So they’re expecting a little boy and painted all the walls blue. Everyone got gifts for a little boy, and they were going to name me Charles. And then I came out of the womb presenting as female, and everyone was confused, and so they ran more tests and found out that I have what’s called “complete androgen insensitivity,” which means that I have XY chromosomes, and was born with internal testes instead of ovaries and a uterus. I never would have menstruated or been able to conceive naturally, but what we know now is that my body would have converted the testosterone produced in my testes into estrogen, and I would have developed completely naturally.

However, that’s not what happened, as there is this prevailing tendency in medical science to see everything in black-and white-and binaries — from the birth certificate on — so my parents had to make a decision: Is she a male or a female? When really I was neither; I was intersex. But there was no box for that on a birth certificate. From the very second an intersex child is born, parents and doctors make decisions so that the child will fit into one of those neat boxes. And so for me, that meant removing my testicles.

So I was castrated or sterilized, depending on how you look at it, when I was an infant. Then I grew up in hormone withdrawal, which is kind of analogous to menopause. So what many women experience in their 60s, I was experiencing as a toddler, and that affects not only your sexual development, but also your bone density and other aspects of your health. And then the psychological burden is tough as well. The doctors tell you that you should keep quiet about this, and “we’re going to make you a very normal little girl,” and “just don’t talk to people about it because they’ll make fun of you.” And the way that you read that as a child is, “I’m not lovable for who I am, and who I am is inherently wrong and not okay.”

It was something I never even spoke about, not even to my brother. The only people in my life that knew were my parents. I constructed this false identity for most of my life, where when my girlfriends would go through puberty and get their period, I would start carrying around tampons, so that they would never know otherwise.

And when I would start dating someone seriously, I would tell them I couldn’t carry their child, but I would never really explain fully why that was, or all the different experiences I went through as a kid. What ultimately compelled me to come out was when here in Texas, the state legislature tried to pass what we call the “bathroom bill” that would have forced transgender individuals to use a bathroom that aligned with the sex indicated on their birth certificate. It wouldn’t have affected me personally because I pee in the women’s room and it says female on my birth certificate — so I would have been fine — but many of my friends would not have, and I basically decided that I was going to have to go into the legislature, to talk about where I pee.

I had passed many laws on sexual assault, human trafficking. All the legislators knew me already. A lot of them used to hit on me. And these are old white men legislators with very conservative values and I basically went in and I told them I was born with balls. Should I just pee outside? I’ll get arrested for doing that. The cops don’t want me doing that, either.

And so I was able to help kill that ridiculous legislation that we’ve been seeing time and time again at the state level and in different ways. Then there’s this attack on the LGBTQ community, which then shot up to the highest level when Trump tried to pass some legislation that further defined marriage as between a man and a woman, and the terms man and woman as binary and immutable, with nothing in between and you can’t change what you are. The intention, of course, is to attack the trans community and to attack the gay community based on marriage rights and identity rights but unintentionally, it writes intersex people out of existence. Because by saying that sex is binary and immutable, that means that I literally do not exist in the eyes of the law. So I’ve had to return many times to the Capitol to remind the legislators of that.

Monika Jiang: You talked about body autonomy, which in so many ways is part of the story that you just shared. And as I understand it, you experienced six medical interventions. Surgical, hormonal, or other medical interventions for the purpose of making a person’s appearance more typical to either side of the binary have been controversial for a long time, and I read that in 2013 Malta became the first country to outlaw such non-consensual interventions. Can you give us a perspective on where the U.S. stands on this currently, and more broadly, the world?

Alicia Weigel: Malta was definitely the first to pass that amazing legislation nationwide. Then Portugal tried. And actually, the Portuguese parliament passed that legislation — it was actually broader legislation with the intersex piece baked into it — but then it was vetoed on the president’s desk or governor’s desk, I can’t remember which. And so they got second farthest in that fight. Portugal does a lot of very progressive legislation so that doesn’t surprise me. The United States is a much more complicated scenario because for one, we’re just so much bigger. Malta’s smaller than probably 95% of our states. And a lot of our cities.

But there’s also just a lot more diversity of thought and values at that scale. So we’ve been trying to think about how to push our agenda forward at the local level, at the state level, and at the federal level. The federal level would obviously be ideal because we could just, like Malta did, kill it all in one fell swoop.

The issue with that is that even were we to pass something through Congress right now, the president that we have in office now would veto it. And so we don’t think it’s worth our time and energy to do that until we have a president in office that is more amenable to those issues. But a lot of the work that I do is actually electing new congressional representatives to the US Congress. And so while I’m doing that, I’m making sure that I bake in these intersex protections into each of their policy platforms for when we are in a more favorable environment at the federal level.

In the meantime, we have attempted some legislation at the state level in California, where we were able to pass a non-binding resolution that condemns these surgeries. Then when we tried to come back around and make it binding, the committee chair, who was going to preside over this hearing, the day before received a huge donation to his reelection PAC. Then he dropped the bill’s hearing from his committee’s agenda.

Corruption is a huge issue in the United States. So another thing we’re working on separately is ending Citizens United and reforming campaign finance and all of that.

Then in terms of local initiatives, last year we had the City of Austin host our first ever official intersex Awareness Day in November, which was awesome. Not only was it amazing having elected officials there and so many activists, we had almost 300 people there, which I believe makes it the largest intersex Awareness Day gathering that’s happened in the U.S. thus far. But we also had a formal apology, on behalf of a very well known and reputable urologist — and urologists are kind of the intersex boogeyman because they’re the ones that rearrange all of our parts without asking us. But there was the chief of urology for Dell Medical, so he’s probably the most prominent and influential urologist in Texas, and he said that he had done surgeries prior, but then he heard the advocacy and activism and had changed his opinion on it, and he went on to formally apologize to the intersex community. And then he put out a formal call to action to all other urologists to halt these unconsented surgeries, which was really, really huge. I think that was also the first time in Texas, traditionally a very conservative state, where we had a doctor of that stature formally condemning the issue.

Monika Jiang: Thank you so much for that, Alicia. I would love to bring in a question actually from the audience. [To participant:] Maybe just unmute yourself and ask the question you posted in the chat?

Participant: I’d like to think that there’s some kind of positive story that we can bring to this, that something about a non-binary perspective can really inform business — specifically a kind of metaphor, or a story we can tell. I’m wondering what you think about that. What would you put into that story?

Alicia Weigel: The existence of intersex people shows how in a realm that is considered to be so cut-and-dry, nothing truly is. Right. And I think that can be extrapolated across any industry. And so I wrote this article in The New York Times in response to when Donald Trump tried to legislate us out of existence, but it really talked about the beauty of the blur, and how so much beauty can be found in those nuances and in these areas of life where things are not cut-and-dry. They force us to really grapple with ourselves and our understanding of the world and humanity itself. And I think that they challenge us to do better and be better.

And I feel like I fundamentally am able to relate to all genders in a way that I think is really useful and has been helpful for me in the world. I was raised as a woman by society, so I can understand that perspective, and you know I’ve experienced pay discrimination in the workplace, like a woman. I’ve experienced sexual assault as a cis-passing woman. So I’ve had a lot of cis woman experiences, but then I’ve also had a lot of experiences that are analogous with the trans community.

You know it was really my ex boyfriend who helped me realize that. He said, “You’ve always been a person who could hang with whoever.” I used to work with homeless, HIV-positive black sex workers on the streets of South Africa. And then I work with wealthy Texas oil donors in the political world, and I can hang in any of those circles and be fine, because there’s something about having been born not knowing anyone else who’s like you that helps you become supremely adaptable.

You’re able to identify with anyone, at least in some small way. And you develop this fundamental empathy because that’s the empathy you want other people to share with you. Before I kind of hated myself, because that’s what society was trying to teach me, but since coming out and freeing myself and learning to love myself, I think I’ve realized how much being intersex has shaped who I am in a positive way. And I hope that you’ll find the same thing.

Monika Jiang: Thank you so much. That was, that was really beautiful. And that’s actually exactly what we’re attempting to do with the remaining time that we have here, to tap into exactly these perspectives. And we’ll move forward now to neurodiversity, speaking of superpowers…

Tim Leberecht: Yes, we’re very happy to welcome our next guest, Ian McDonald, CTO in Residence at Microsoft for Startups. He has dedicated his work to engineering workplace cultures that embrace this human diversity, the infinite variations of our minds and thinking. Ian has autism or specifically Asperger syndrome, and as he says, he considers it sometimes a disability, but most of the time, a secret superpower. So please welcome with your silent applause Ian McDonald. And Ian is going to walk us through a five-minute or so overview of the issue of neurodiversity.

Ian McDonald: Hello to everybody and just a little bit about me. You can get hold of me on Twitter, at @imcdnzl, and I’m very happy to talk to people afterwards. So how did I realize that I had autism and Asperger’s? I had basically always known I was a little bit different, but I had no idea until I saw a TV campaign from the local autistic society in New Zealand.

And they had five things on the screen: “Do you do this? You might have autism!’’ And I said to my then-fiance, “Doesn’t everybody do this?” and she said no. That’s when I went to a clinical psychologist and got a formal diagnosis.

But I always realized that I didn’t quite fit and to the point of the archaic health systems, as we heard before, I was thrown in a mental institution at the age of two for several months. And my mother wasn’t allowed to see me and they basically decided they’re going to lock me away for life at the age of two because I was slow at walking, even though I actually walked just two days before they admitted me to the hospital. They said they didn’t care; I was never going to make anything of my life.

So, you know, some of the physical things I’ve got: a sensitivity to fabrics, textures, foods. When I was younger, I wouldn’t wear a whole lot of clothes, I wouldn’t eat a whole lot of food, because it just felt wrong and irritated me. I had a real lack of coordination, or motor skills. Restless tics.

I have some of the symptoms of Tourette’s syndrome. For example, I don’t swear in public at the wrong time, but I certainly have those strong urges and I tic like crazy at times or “stimming,” as it’s called in autism circles, as well. And you know the whole social awkwardness, the body language and communication things that I get wrong all the time, still. Yeah. I had to learn that you’re meant to look people in the face. I got told that because it wasn’t a natural behavior to me. And then when I was reading a book and the author talked about how you’re meant to look people in the eyes and I said, “Eyes?”

I’d always been looking at the mouth. Because when I heard I was to look at people in the face, I didn’t know why. I thought it must be to try and understand what they were saying, so watch people’s mouths, not eyes.

And about three or four years ago, when I was just about fired for this, as I’d been fired several times in my career, my boss turned to me in exasperation and asked, “Why are you like this?” and then I broke down in tears and told him. And he was a bit taken aback but it turned out I could just totally transform the whole environment and (a) save my job, and (b) I realized that I could add value by talking about it.

Later I got tested by a clinical psychologist as five standard deviations above mean IQ. Often us aspies — that’s a slang term — are in tech science. And it’s great to have Microsoft with an autism hiring program in some countries, and we’re trying to roll it out into more. And in the program we do away with the traditional interview process and reinvent everything. So the hiring’s handled in a completely different way.

I spend about 20 to 25% of my time on improving diversity in the tech ecosystem, whether that’s working with people of color, like with Backstage Capital I headed up the London relationship, whether that’s working with, you know, different communities, women, neurodivergence. I get heavily involved with more than a dozen diversity organizations and how they relate to the startup ecosystem.

So a few facts around neurodivergence. About one in 10 people are neurodivergent in some way, whether it’s ADHD, dyslexia, autism, OCD, Tourette’s. Some definitions will cover bipolar schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. About one in 100 people are believed to have autism or Asperger’s, and the ratio of male to female diagnosis is three to one. It’s not 100% clear whether there is a biological difference there, or whether it’s an effect of how women communicate more, and that can mask the autism. Some say that part of the disorder is a physical disconnection between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

Seventy percent of autistic people have a mental health problem. One in three have a learning disability, and part of that comes down to the disparity between what’s called low-functioning or high-functioning autism. These are bad labels at times and good labels as well. I don’t quite like many of the labels that are put out there. On some days I can feel very low-functioning as well.

And then in the UK, only 16% of people with autism have full-time employment, supposedly, and this is according to the Autism Society. So I think that number is around diagnosed people with autism. I think the employment ratio will be much higher when you see what society would call “odd” people or misfits, and when you look at the tech sector, in particular, I can see so many people who I believe are on the spectrum, but aren’t diagnosed.

Monika Jiang: You’ve described Asperger’s as a secret superpower. Can you share more specifically a situation that comes to mind when you felt that strongly, and one situation in which you rather considered it a disability?

Ian McDonald: Yeah, so most people think of superpowers as things like intellectual ability. So I’m going to skip over that because it’s well-known. But as a manager — I’ve managed hundreds of people over the years — I’ve had so many people say I’m the best manager that they’ve ever had. And the reason why is because I never understood people. I made so many mistakes when I was young, I then went and got a shelf of management books, and just read them beginning to end, and then implemented their recommendations as processes. So because of my deficiency I then compensated by making sure I do certain things with all my employees.

I also realized that since I’m different, everybody’s different, and I try to work out what people’s motivations are and rather than having a cookie-cutter formula. So I think that was a superpower.

Unsuperpower? I constantly miscommunicate. I chime in at the wrong time and interrupt conversations. I’m not quite sure when it’s my time to talk ,and I say things that other people will consider not quite right, or inappropriate, at times.

Tim Leberecht: I have a question for you. And it’s about COVID-19. So last week was World Autism Awareness Day and UN Secretary General António Guterrez was saying he’s worried that some of the advances we’ve seen for people with autism, or other groups, might be rolled back. You know, like the LGBTQ community, as well as neuro-minorities — very vulnerable in times of crisis. Have you experienced that so far?

Ian McDonald: Yeah, personally, it hasn’t affected me so much, but I know other people whom it has. And everybody’s saying, “I’m struggling to communicate and have a video conference. Things are unusual for me, it’s a change, and I’m not coping with the change well.” And I’m like, “Welcome to my world! That’s how I live every day.” I mean to cope with the everyday world, I mask a lot. I hide who I am a lot of the time, and I’m living in a constant state of stress. So, you know, it’s just a new kind of stress.

But for other people, I suspect that that new level of stress will push people over the edge, whereas I’ve learned how to cope with stress. And so new stresses don’t bother me so much, although I do run on a high stress level.

Tim Leberecht: There’s actually a comment from a participant saying, “I’m wondering if acknowledging our differences from a medical standpoint is a way to get our authenticity back?”

And I think that’s probably also the great hope expressed in an article by Nancy Doyle in Forbes: “The world needs minorities, now more than ever, and needs divergent thinking more than ever now in the face of this crisis.” And perhaps we can carry these lessons forward and actually establish a more diverse workplace in the future. Are you hopeful that’s going to be one of the outcomes of this episode?

Ian McDonald: I’m not sure. I’m just hopeful that society is becoming more accepting of people in general. It is useful to have a diagnosis, or to be able to explain to people what it’s all about. But I think it’d be even more useful when people don’t feel the need to question why somebody is different rather than just accept that we are all different.

Tim Leberecht: And what can, in your opinion, neurotypical people learn from neurodivergent people, especially when it comes to work. Are there certain traits, or certain ways to see the world, that they can adopt, that they can learn from?

Ian McDonald: If you try to approach things from different angles you’ll get different results, and better results. One of the best bosses I had was CTO at News Corp. He deliberately hired a senior management team that were all very different in thinking to him, and he had no idea I was autistic, and he had no idea about the backgrounds of half the people who worked for him, but whereas most people hire somebody who’s like them, he went and hired somebody who’s different from him to deliberately try and get better results. That’s a lesson that we’ll hopefully learn. I hope it would really encourage people to select from a whole range or perspectives.

Tim Leberecht: Perfect, Ian. Thank you so much. Now we move on to a non-binary technology that promises to change everything — the end of zero and ones. There’s a famous quote by the American physicist John Wheeler, who said, “If you are not confused by quantum mechanics, you do not understand it.” Alyssa Wilms is a quantum computing scientist at Porsche Digital in Berlin. Alissa, how confused are you still about quantum mechanics?

Alissa Wilms: Very confused. I don’t understand anything.

Monika Jiang: So what are the current approaches to physically implement a quantum computer?

Alissa Wilms: So the process to physically implement a quantum computer are in zeros and ones, but also in the in-between, because that’s what the magic of quantum computing is made up of. But maybe to elaborate on this further, the approach to implement a quantum computer is also physical and non-physical at the same time. So this is something where creative thoughts of no boundaries at all, like physical limits, come in.

Tim Leberecht: Then second, which tech company in partnership with NASA claimed in 2019 to have achieved quantum supremacy?

Alissa Wilms: So there was a big fight between IBM and Google about who actually achieved quantum supremacy, but the question is regarding IBM’s supercomputer because Google claimed an IBM supercomputer would need millions and millions of years to solve this problem.

And of course, IBM said no, we don’t. But in the end, Google needs a few seconds and IBM a few days. So there’s still a big difference. It’s just like a very academic war over where exactly to draw the boundary between quantum computing and classical computing, or where quantum computing takes off completely from classical computing. And I think what’s really nice here is that new things actually also trigger how old things develop because IBM came up with really creative ideas about how to elaborate on their supercomputers.

So quantum computing research is not only growing quantum computing, but also the classical computers as well.

Monika Jiang: What about Albert Einstein? Did he believe in quantum mechanics?

Alissa Wilms: A professor of mine always said that when very intelligent people are wrong, then you can learn more from that than if they’re right. And I think that’s the case you have here, because Einstein was wrong and he tried to disprove certain quantum mechanic postulates of the Kopenhagener Interpretation. So basically he did try to disprove quantum mechanics, by which we found entanglement, one of the vivid things everybody has in mind right now.

So I think this tells a lot about how science progresses, and also about what being wrong means, and how much good there can be in being wrong.

Monika Jiang: Last question: Quantum mechanics works the same way both forward and backward in time. Causes can seem to propagate backward in time, occurring after their effects. True or not true?

Alissa Wilms: So there’s something that’s called the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics from Feynman, where you have virtual particles traveling backwards in time which don’t actually exist because they’re “virtual.” So I guess this answer is true and not true at the same time.

Some of the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics, like the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics, like the Heisenberg equation of an isolated system ​is time translationally invariant. The dynamics of the system described the Schrödinger equation is time reversal symmetric under let’s call them special circumstances, between measurements and with a complex conjugation. The problem here is wanting to measure you destroy the system, and you destroy the symmetry in time. So I guess, depending on what you do and where you look to find different answers to this question, which means time defined in quantum mechanics is something completely different than what we encounter in our lives, and what Einstein thought up in his general relativity theory, which is one of the reasons why people have a very hard time trying to combine quantum mechanics and relativity theory.

Tim Leberecht: Thank you. I mean, it’s a revolutionary insight: that the world is not binary, essentially, which is one of the premises of quantum. How will the world change once quantum becomes a widely accepted paradigm?

Alissa Wilms: I think we will have a completely different view on what complexity means and what computability means. So what is possible and what can machines make possible, but also we’re not trying to fit everything into 0–1 because we don’t have to anymore.

And we will be able to statistically sample from regions we have never encountered now. So, which are so rare and which basically “should not happen” in the digital world, but will happen in the quantum world, and that’s something that has a lot of beauty in it, and a lot of potential.

Tim Leberecht: Okay. So wow that was a broad range of topics that we saw to cover for this hour. We have time for one last question, actually for each of the speakers, but also for all of you.

And the question is, if the post COVID-19 future world is shaped by a non-binary concept of life, what is your hope for this world? In one word.

Ian McDonald: I’m gonna cheat and use two words, which I thought about beforehand, which is acceptance and empowerment.

Alissa Wilms: Differentiated.

Tim Leberecht: What’s your word, Monika?

Monika Jiang: My word is adaptability.

Tim Leberecht: Mine is richness.

Tim Leberecht: Thank you so much Alicia, Ian, and Alissa. Thank you all very much for joining.

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