Because ultimately, making the community better will help her, too. Maybe after all the questions have been asked and answered, she won’t be considered unusual anymore. Maybe no trans people will be. “You’re not going to want to be here because I’m not going to be a story,” she said. “That’s really what we’re looking for.”

When I met Vivienne for the first time, she was smiling serenely. There was no trace—physical or emotional—of the troubled college student who nearly committed suicide. Her surgical procedures worked so well that no one would ever suspect she wasn’t assigned female at birth. She often gets catcalled by men. The only thing she misses about presenting as a man, she says, is peeing standing up. “When the world is your toilet, you have a certain power,” she told me with a smirk. That, and the fact that after she transitioned, people stopped asking her math questions, she says. As frustrating as it is, sometimes being underestimated by venture capitalists allows Vivienne to outmaneuver them.

Still, still! Though she no longer feels like the “gorilla in a tutu” she felt she resembled before her operations, Vivienne struggles with the nagging sense that she doesn’t belong. If she’s invited to speak at events, she hides out in her hotel room. She feels anxious talking one-on-one. “It’s so evocative of feelings I had when I was younger. It’s not like the gender fairy came and fixed everything,” she told me when we met up one summer. “I still have an instinct to duck out of the way when I see someone, unless I have a tactical plan to discuss something with them. Why would anyone be interested in talking to me? I feel like I’m inflicting myself on other people.”

“You don’t spend thirty years of your life learning how not to connect with people and change that overnight,” she added.

And yet, she is constantly called upon to explain her life story, to represent transgender people, to answer endless questions about herself. (She has been profiled a few times before, and I can only imagine what it’s like to trot out the worst moments of your childhood to journalist after journalist over BLTs.) Even if she wasn’t so pretty, and so smart, she would still never get to be just an average, unassuming woman. Her background is just too splashy of an angle.

It sounded like she was on the path toward accepting all that. “I’m my kids’ mom. I’m a scientist out in the world. I’m an entrepreneur who has had real success. I genuinely feel ‘me,’” Vivienne explained, the sun glinting off her blond curls. “I’m Vivienne Ming, the weird woman with the weird name. I’m comfortable with being a big outlier. It’s not just okay, it’s the right thing to be different.”