And though shrimp and fingertip lay at differing distances from my brain, they felt each other simultaneously, a diverting issue in neuroscience known as the binding problem. Days later it happened again on another finger. Some developmental time passed and I grasped the implications. Biology is destiny, and destiny is digital, and in this case binary. It was bleakly simple. The strangely essential matter at the heart of every birth was now settled. Either—or. Nothing else. No one exclaims at the moment of one’s dazzling coming-out, It’s a person! Instead: It’s a girl, It’s a boy. Pink or blue—a minimal improvement on Henry Ford’s offer of cars of any colour so long as they were black. Only two sexes. I was disappointed. If human bodies, minds, fates are so complex, if we are free like no other mammal, why limit the range? I seethed, and then, like everyone else, I settled down and made the best of my inheritance. For sure, complexity would come upon me in time. Until then, my plan was to arrive as a freeborn Englishman, a creature of the post English-as-well-as-Scottish-and-French Enlightenment.
