Am I Normal? with Mona Chalabi: Which box do I check? (Transcript)

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
I mean I actually came out to my parents as white when I was 14. Just, I was like, right, I'm going to fully identify as a Brit. And I took a scholarship to Eton College, which, you know, I don't know if listeners know, is that probably the whitest British school, you know. You wear tailcoats. And that was me trying to be British, and I erased everything else from my system.

Mona Chalabi:
This is Amrou Al-Kadhi. Yep, that’s an Arabic name. Amrou is an author and screenwriter.

Mona Chalabi:
I'm also British Iraqi. It's very exciting and rare to have two British Iraqis in conversation with each other, yeah!

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
Totally! ...When I was growing up in the Middle East and... was very, very Muslim at the time, and was realizing that I was gay and queer, I was like really trying to occupy Islam solely and kind of reject that other side. And then when I came to the U.K. and I was 13, and then the Iraq war happened in that year, 2003. So I was like in the U.K. and the U.K. was bombing Iraq and I'm from Iraq, but I also really had quite a negative attitude towards Islam because of some of the homophobia I experienced.

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
As a young person, I just wanted to be like, am I British or am I Arab? Am I this or am I that?

Mona Chalabi:
Amrou is not 14 anymore, and how they think about this stuff has changed. They are no longer choosing between their different identities.

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
My other name is Glamrou. That’s my drag name.

Mona Chalabi:
Glamrou is empowered, ascerbic, and Muslim. She challenges ideas about who can do drag and what a Muslim looks like.

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
I love dressing up, you know, as a full queer drag queen, who's also wearing an Islamic abaya, you know... It’s trying to just say I'm all of these things in one go. It just brings it all together for me on an emotional level.

Mona Chalabi:
While Amrou and I check some of the same boxes—British and Arab—we’re both trying to reconsider them. Whether it’s through drag or data journalism, we’re trying to figure out what those categories are good for, AND what they’re not.

From the TED Audio Collective, this is Am I Normal? I’m Mona Chalabi and I’m a data journalist, so I see categories in data every day. Sometimes they’re helpful, and sometimes not so much.

Back when I first started working with data, I got this job with a big NGO that was trying to help people that were displaced by violence in Iraq.

The organization was based in Jordan, not Iraq. And I worked with a team whose job it was to put together questionnaires for Iraqis. One major survey that they were conducting asked the question: What do you need? Blankets or food?

My job was to analyze the questionnaire results and make these fancy 3D pie charts. The organization would then take my charts to donors and raise millions of dollars to buy blankets or food.

One day some of the people who were conducting these surveys flew into Amman for a conference. I’ll never forget that I was sitting in this hotel conference room when this tall Kurdish guy in a dapper tan suit came over to me and said: “You know it’s all wrong, right? The data is all wrong.”

I was confused. He explained, “Well, your questions asked if people needed blankets or food. But what they actually need is electricity generators. But that just wasn’t an option on the survey.”

So the Iraqis were checking the boxes that were available to them. And the data we had—all that money that was spent on blankets and food—it was kind of missing the point.

It was a rude awakening. But it helped me to see the limits of checkboxes, particularly when they are either/or, and people are left with a binary choice...

In 2020, as part of my job, I was covering the U.S. census. The census happens every 10 years in the U.S. It’s a chance to count the population using categories like race, ethnicity, gender, age, and so much more.

Mona Chalabi:
So I don't know if you know, but in the U.S., there's no Arab category on the U.S. census. Do you know that?

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
No I didn't know that, actually... ‘Any other ethnic group’ is usually the one that I tick.

Mona Chalabi:
The 2020 Census listed Middle Eastern nationalities like Lebanese and Egyptian when it was guiding respondents about who should check themselves as racially ‘white’. Middle Easterners who didn’t feel comfortable with that could check a box labeled ‘other’ down at the bottom of the form. So Arabs got a choice between ‘white’ and ‘other’.

Mona Chalabi:
I think being constantly ‘other’ on forms as I was younger, helped to reinforce the idea that I was just ‘other.’

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
I agree.

Mona Chalabi:
Since not everyone from the Middle East is ethnically Arab, ‘white’ might well be a label that some people would feel comfortable using. But suggesting that the ‘white’ box could be a decent option for the rest of us, frankly felt ridiculous. Especially considering the racism that Arabs have to deal with in the U.S. We’re not treated like we’re white... so why would we check the ‘white’ box?

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
I'm just wondering how kind of malign the political intention of that is... Of, of not putting Arab on the form.

Mona Chalabi:
My head went to the exact same place, because I know that the government uses the census to allocate resources... I know that census numbers and categories can be used for good. They have all sorts of implications: for the kind of education a kid gets, to the kind of housing people live in, and the healthcare services people have access to.

Census numbers determine how billions of government dollars are allocated to communities every year. And the programs they fund really make a difference.

Let me give you an example. By the ‘60s, the U.S. government had looked at how inequality was playing out in the job market, specifically for black people in the wake of segregation and enslavement. The research showed who was being hired, fired, and who was advancing to management roles. And, surprise surprise, racism was rampant. This was hard evidence that was difficult to ignore.

It was the height of public support during the Civil Rights Movement, and the government realized that if they were serious about equality, or at least about covering their asses, they’d need to do better.

So, the government enacted policy that meant that federal agencies had to hit certain hiring targets. They had to enact recruiting initiatives for black applicants, and they had to be transparent about the race of their employees. And that didn't just apply to the government itself, it was also anyone who wanted to CONTRACT with the government.

All of these policies were part of an initiative called Affirmative Action, and they helped.

One study that was conducted between 1974 and 1980 showed that the rate of non-white employment went up by 20% for federal contractors. Meanwhile, companies who didn’t use Affirmative Action policies only increased their non-white employment by 12%.

To this day, the U.S. Department of Labor requires federal employers to have Affirmative Action Programs in place. So the law says that people need to have access to public contracts, regardless of their race, disability status, or sexual orientation.

The Arab American Institute estimates that there are about 3.7 million Arabs in the U.S. With no separate box to tick, that’s 3.7 million people that are not being properly categorized in the census. And that means that the government isn’t tracking if we’re getting our fair share.

So, check boxes matter. And it’s not just about federal dollars or jobs... It's cultural too. Amrou sees this lack of representation all the time when they’re pitching U.S. TV shows that might appeal to an Arab audience.

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
I've definitely noticed it in my, like, line of work that... the Arab audience feels quite speculative and hypothetical. I will pitch, you know, all-Arab casts, an all, an all-Arab show or whatever, and commissioners will think, “Ooh, is this niche or is there the audience for it?” And it, because I suppose they don't have the data, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that they're not going to commission the Arab work, because they don't really know that there's an Arab audience looking for it.

Mona Chalabi:
And the other aspect of that is representation. So because we have no idea how many Arabs there are in the U.S., it’s impossible to fight for things like political representation, representation in the, in the arts, in cinema or in TV.

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
It's like, “Ooh, they are there somewhere, aren't they? But who knows where they are…” And it’s like, well, I guarantee you, if you make the show, you'll see how many there are.

Mona Chalabi:
If you aren’t visible in the data set, it can be like your very existence is being erased.

Last summer, I was quarantined in my Brooklyn apartment.

The pandemic was raging, and my street was eerily quiet... I was hunkered down painting these silhouettes of New Yorkers I was no longer seeing every day:

Two men in baseball-caps huddled over a chess board. A woman with a baby strapped to her chest. A skateboarder, a Hasidic man, a middle schooler, a guy selling ice cream. All portraits of people in New York City.

The painting was part of a project that I’d started long before the pandemic, before I was suddenly spending all my time alone in my living room, and missing the busy bodegas, parties, and just top-notch people-watching.

The idea was to turn New York’s census data into 100 characters that would represent and celebrate the city. To do it, I studied the data to figure out exactly how to distribute race, age, disability status, and gender among the 100 characters.

The portraits looked simple. They were these overlapping line drawings with bright colors. But in reality, each person I drew had loads of complicated calculations behind them that weren’t always visible in the painting.

For example, I drew some characters with obvious indications of disability—like a wheelchair or a cane—but I purposely left others without the obvious indicators. I wanted to represent people with disabilities that aren’t visible. Other drawings showed people living in wealth or poverty, but you’d never know it at a glance. Only I knew, because I had the data.

In many ways, despite all my research, constructing these characters felt almost impossible. See, these New Yorkers were all approximations. They were constructs that were designed to stand in for larger groups. Boiling down more than 8 million people to just 100 generalizations meant that there would have to be gaps: I could never illustrate all the ways that people represent multiple identities.

So I did my best with the data that was available. I tried to make something that was beautiful and informative.

When I was done, I stepped back to look at my seven-foot-wide painting of New Yorkers, and I realized something. Although I had spent months trying to create a picture of the city that was as accurate as possible, I wasn’t up there on the canvas because I wasn't in the data. So I didn’t draw myself in my own project, in my own city. I’d have to try to find myself in some of the other census checkboxes, like age, marital status, or sex.

In theory, sure, I could look like one of the brown characters in my painting. But the census data wouldn’t tell me if that character really was Arab. That’s a problem. Because seeing is important, but so is just knowing the facts.

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
The kind of major crises of anxiety I've had in my life have been attempting to fit into one category.

Mona Chalabi:
Yeah... I mean I saw that you tweeted the other day, this screenshot of the three gender boxes on a, on a form, one of which was ‘nonbinary’, right?

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
Oh, yeah I did.

Mona Chalabi:
It's so rare for a dataset to include nonbinary people. What did it mean to you to see that option on the form?

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
It's actually funny. It was a form in America for a union that I'm joining in America, the WGA, which is the Writers Guild of America that I was joining. It was just ticking a form and it just made me feel a little bit more comfortable. And it was so casual... that I was like, wow, did this kill anyone?

Mona Chalabi:
On the census and across most official forms, there are only two gender boxes available for ticking: woman and man. But Amrou doesn't identify as either. They’re nonbinary. And just like counting men and women, it is important to count nonbinary people too.

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
It's good for them to have the data to know how many trans or nonbinary screenwriters are working in America, because actually like, data just came out that like,in four years there's not been a lead trans character in a single Hollywood movie.

Mona Chalabi:
It's interesting ‘cause those words that you use, of queer or nonbinary... they're almost categories that are about critiquing categories?

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
Yeah, I, I actually think that's a really nice way of putting it. And I think that's maybe why it makes so many people uncomfortable because... you know, a lot of the crisis that people have about nonbinary identities is that it destabilizes something that they have taken as given or fixed their whole life. And, I mean, I understand where that anxiety comes from of, “Oh God, how am I going to place you?”

Mona Chalabi:
It’s obvious that we don’t all fit into narrow definitions, and that trying to fit can be harmful. By definition, categories are generalizations. And as you start to get into finer categories, it’s like Russian dolls. Eventually you just get down to individuals.

Amrou got me thinking about these smaller units in a whole new way...

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
Quantum physics looks at the really granular detail of the world to subatomic particles, like smaller than atoms... Just the, like, minutiae of physical reality.

Mona Chalabi:
As a college student trying out different classes for fun, Amrou got into physics by accident. And when they took some lectures in quantum physics, they were captivated.

See, standard physical principles are Newtonian physics: Those attempt to find the fixed scientific laws that govern our world—like cause-and-effect of mechanical force, pulleys and levers, you know, things like that. BUT...

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
Quantum physics basically contradicts a lot of what we thought was given in standard physical principles... So like, if A happens, B happens. Or if you pull, something will be pushed. Quantum physics shows that those events are only part of the picture and there's actually other things happening on a subatomic level which don’t happen in observable reality.

Mona Chalabi:
In the course, a professor explained an experiment that is at the foundation of quantum physics. It’s called the double slit experiment.

In one version of this experiment, electrons are fired through a wall with two slits in it. And a machine measures whether they go through the left or right slit.

But every now and then, the same electron moves through both slits at the same time. The same particle can be in multiple places at once... Two versions of the same event happening at the same time. Not one check box, but two.

For Amrou, it was a revelation. Quantum physics shows us that what's understood as reality is just an approximation of what’s happening subatomically. Like my painting, it’s a practical representation of something that is much, much more complex.

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
If subatomic particles, which literally we’re made out of—everything's made out of them—can do multiple things at the same time, then why are we so fixed on rigid categories?

Mona Chalabi:
This experiment is something that Amrou returns to time and again when their gender is being questioned or invalidated.

Mona Chalabi:
There's a really interesting parallel here with data, because you're saying that our understanding of science... approximates the truth. Is that, is that how you described it?

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
What it more is, is that... What is observed is recorded as the truth.

Mona Chalabi:
Exactly. Exactly.

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
So that’s when... it was like, oh wow, there’s actually, like, physical proof that the world is inherently kind of queer.

Mona Chalabi:
Imagine how much better our understanding would be if we just asked refugees what they needed, instead of asking them to choose between blankets and food.

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
I usually quite like it when a form comes along that just says, you know, ‘other’, and then you can—yeah, write it in. You know, I actually have trans friends who say, “I'm a trans woman, I'm a woman, but in my perfect world, I wouldn't need those definitions.”

Mona Chalabi:
Yeah.

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
But, but within the existing—look, we have to live, right? Like... the subatomic world sounds like chaos, to be honest. It does sound quite stressful and like, we need to organize it.

Mona Chalabi:
It's kind of like, in a perfect world, maybe we wouldn't have ANY categories and we'd simply be able to like, observe the world without any of these lenses... but we can't. So, how do you reconcile those two things? The fact that the categories are overly simplistic, but also that they're necessary?

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
Yeah, like, that's a really interesting question. And I actually think that that need to reconcile it should be resisted a little bit... To look at reality itself as constructed, which is exactly what queer theory does.

When I started doing drag at university, I was like only occupying my like gay identity. And I wasn't including my Arab heritage in it because I thought that was like, oppositional towards my queer identity. And so, every time that I've tried to have one stable identity, it's meant sacrificing another key part of myself.

Mona Chalabi:
For Amrou, the answer to the world’s obsession with categories is Glamrou. Up on stage, with her heels and Quran, Glamrou celebrates the farce of trying to fit into the invented categories of ‘woman’ and ‘Arab’. She pushes at the limits of their definition.

Thinking about categories a little bit more like drag might help us to take them for what they are: performative. Categories are just flashy approximations of reality that serve a functional purpose. They are not reality itself.

More than getting the RIGHT categories, it’s important that we’re open to our categories being adaptable.

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
I'm not for like abolishing categories, but more just like finding as many of them as possible and realizing that it’s just really complicated. To just be slightly more open about the fluidity of these things. I don’t, it's not an abolition thing. It's a sort of, just an expanding thing.

Mona Chalabi:
I love that because I feel like you're saying both that... the pursuit of knowledge is beautiful, the desire to complicate categories, to keep on finding new language to understand our world... but also to accept that we're never going to get it right, and that that pursuit will never end in a perfect understanding of reality.

Amrou Al-Kadhi:
Yeah. You actually have to sit with the discomfort and be like, this is chaos and that's okay.

Mona Chalabi:
When we become wedded to categories as these factual absolutes, we lose sight of the way that categories are fictions that WE invented as a tool. If we could remember that, then maybe our understanding of reality would be a little bit more honest, more flexible, and more inclusive.

And maybe, by making a habit of questioning when our categories are serving us, and when they’re not, we can get better at refining them. Because one day, I’d like to see myself drawn as a little character in my beloved New York City.

Am I Normal? is part of the TED Audio Collective. It’s hosted and produced by me, Mona Chalabi, and brought to you by the teams at TED and Transmitter Media. This episode was produced by Jess Shane and JoAnn DeLuna. Sara Nics is Transmitter’s Executive Editor, Wilson Sayre and Lacy Roberts are our Managing Producers, and Gretta Cohn is our Executive Producer. The TED Team is Michelle Quint, Banban Cheng, and Roxanne Hai Lash. Jennifer Nam is our researcher and fact checker. Additional production by Domino Sound.

The original theme song is by Sasami. Michelle Macklem is our sound designer and mix engineer.

After we made this episode, the U.S. issued its first gender-neutral passport. Now, people who don’t identify as either male or female are able to use passports with an X designation. It is a milestone for nonbinary people’s rights.

We are back next week with more Am I Normal? Make sure that you follow the show in your favorite podcast app so that you can get every episode delivered straight to your device. And if you enjoyed the show and want to support us, that’s great! Hit the share button to send it to everyone you know who has ever felt like they didn’t fit into just one category.

You can find more about this episode’s guest, Amrou Al-Kadhi, at the following links:

Instagram: @Glamrou

Website: www.amroualkadhi.com

Book: Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between