In 1776, a Quaker living in Philadelphia recovered from a severe illness with a peculiar conviction: they had died and been reborn as the Public Universal Friend. The Public Universal Friend was sans gender but avec mission: to spread the message, received during the illness, that there is “Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory, for Thee and for everyone.”
To this day, scholars debate the nature of the Public Universal Friend’s transformation. Was the Public Universal Friend a trans or non-binary person? Or was the Public Universal Friend a woman, as assigned at birth, who embraced gender non-conformity to acquire some measure of personal and professional freedom? Is the Public Universal Friend’s identity reducible to an object lesson on the tyranny of gender roles, the tyranny of sexism, or the universal nature of God? Or did the Public Universal Friend, like all of us, contain multitudes?
There may be “room, room, room” in Big Tech’s servers for billions of accounts. But there is no room for more than one self. {read}