We are all of us descended from creatures who—while figuring out how to feed and protect themselves in an oft-dangerous and unfriendly world—somehow found the time to invent poetry, trebuchets, the microprocessor, and Love Is Blind.

We contain multitudes, in other words, but many of our social norms and internal pressures hobble or compress our multifarious natures, flattening our full complexity into something easier to label and organize.

We thus end up narrowly self-defining for public ...