Good article, but why are the titles always clickbait? She doesn't seem that “unlikely” to me, and she didn't hack the pandemic – the hacking was to do with mitigation efforts, and not the actual virus or disease.
And knowing her reputation in the hacker community, it is anything but unlikely to me that something like this has happened.
I have heard that in modern times, some actually use the pinyin tā in a sentence consisting otherwise only of Chinese characters to represent the truly gender-neutral pronoun. However, I've never seen that myself; I've seen only 他.
Incidentally, this is why you'll sometimes hear a native Chinese speaker mistakenly use "he" or "him" instead of "she" or "her." It's a distinction they don't make in their native spoken language, so it doesn't come naturally to them.
I know speakers of foreign languages with strong gendering (as in every person/object has a gender in their language) and they will still confuse she/he at times.