Outwardly, Norma was Vivienne’s rock, but internally, she reeled. Vivienne had never given her any previous indication she longed to live as a female. But she made up her mind. “Vivienne is the one I love,” Norma told Oprah magazine300 later, “the one with whom I have chosen to spend the rest of my life.”

They got married, Norma in a dress and Vivienne in a tuxedo. Vivienne changed her name from the male name she had been given as a child, and the couple mashed their last names together to form “Ming.”

She and Norma went to Goodwill to buy a single dress, and that was the first time Vivienne ever existed openly in the world. Vivienne got Norma pregnant the old-fashioned way, before beginning a series of injections that would change her hormone makeup to resemble that of an adult female. She then underwent an arduous series of surgeries. Some procedures sculpted her penis into a vagina, others shaved away her strong jawline to reveal a daintier, more girlish chin.

But she stuck to her mission of shining a light on social problems. She earned a PhD in computational neuroscience and founded a series of companies focused on health and education issues, such as an app that helps parents of diabetic kids track blood sugar levels.

“I find that the world is full of problems that ought to get more attention than they do,” she told me one spring day in 2018. For one of her projects, Vivienne looked at a database of millions of professional profiles to calculate “the cost of being different,” as she calls it. For example, after comparing software developers named “Joe” and “José,” she found that José would need a master’s degree or higher to get promoted, while Joe could do it with no degree at all, she explained in the Financial Times.301 Meanwhile, female software engineers need a master’s degree to compete with men who have BAs. “This translates into a tax of $100,000–$300,000 for a chance at the same career outcomes,” she wrote. To help bridge this disparity, Vivienne has developed software that can help companies dig up unconventional developers, like those who don’t have degrees but might be worth hiring anyway for their great work.

She seems to still suffer from a great deal of impostor syndrome. Over the course of several phone calls, she described variations on wanting to “crawl under a bed,” at times. The reason she’s able to cope is that she keeps her focus on her projects and the greater mission of maximizing human potential, rather than on herself.

“When people say a nasty thing to me,” she says, she just thinks to herself, “it’s not about me, it’s about making a difference.”

Allie

Like the individuals who looked at their problems from an outside perspective, finding a mission larger than themselves helped nonconformists like Vivienne and Mary remain focused on their goals, rather than their insecurities.