Building
the Room

When I worked in the Government of Canada, a female coworker told me: if you want your idea implemented, make a man think it was his idea.

I've thought about that sentence for years.

I don't usually lead with this, because I prefer to let my work speak first. But this room calls for vulnerability. I'm trans and intersex. XXY; born and socialized as male, while going through a female puberty. I've since transitioned, found sobriety, and built a career I'm proud of.

What that experience gave me, beyond the obvious, was a strange kind of double vision. I grew up surrounded by women. Women who saved my life, got me through addiction, welcomed me into their spaces and celebrated my wins without condition. And yet the story I was handed about women... the ambient cultural story, the one you absorb without choosing it, was something else entirely. Quieter. More corrosive.

That gap, between the women I knew and the story being told about them, is what I want to examine today. Because I think it is the same gap many of you navigate every time you walk into a boardroom, a codebase review, or a funding pitch.

Finding out I was intersex and trans cracked something open for me philosophically. I started studying sex and gender seriously, and what I found was that the frame extended far beyond either. Most of the world we navigate is constructed. Not imaginary, constructed. There is a difference.

Language is constructed. Law is constructed. Financial systems, educational institutions, the economy, the categories we use to sort human beings into hierarchies of value, all of it is built, maintained and transmitted by people, across time, through repetition and agreement. Social constructs are not less real for being constructed. Environmental law shapes the material reality of forests. Anti-trans policies can selectively shape human biology across generations. The relationship between what we build socially and what becomes materially true is not a one-way street. They inform each other constantly.

The technology industry has been rewriting social reality since the industrial revolution. It has reshaped how we work, organize, and understand ourselves. That is an enormous amount of creative power. And for most of its history, that power has been held by a remarkably small and remarkably similar group of people.

This is not just a fairness problem, though it is unfair. It is a design problem. The systems being built, the futures being modeled, the assumptions being coded into infrastructure that billions of people will live inside, they reflect the room where they were made. The gaps in that room become gaps in the world.

My coworker's advice was wise, and it was a quiet tragedy. She had learned to dissolve her own authorship to move her ideas forward. A lot of us have learned that. It works, until it doesn't, and until the cost accumulates beyond what we can absorb alone.

The alternative is not louder self-promotion. It is collective creation. Building the kind of rooms where that advice becomes obsolete. Where the construct itself gets redesigned, from inside, by the people who were never supposed to be there.

The women who came before us fought to get us into these rooms. What we build while we're in them is now ours to decide.

That's the idea I want to leave you with. Not a slogan. Not a metric. A framework. We are not here to inherit a broken model of what technology and leadership look like. We are here to build something different, together, with the full weight of everything women have always known how to do.