Remembering Lynn Conway, Tech Visionary that Transphobia Almost Erased

our communities. And that is one of the reasons why I really wanted to spend this time honoring computer scientist Lynn Conway. To me, Lynn Conway really represents all three past, present, and the future. Now. I have talked about Lynn's story across various podcasts over the last few years, and what strikes me is that a lot of those conversations were about her past, but we also got to celebrate her

present and she was still alive. And I am a big believer in giving people their flowers while they are still here to smell them. And so now I am left wondering about what her legacy means for the future. And that's because Lynn Conway passed away this week from a heart condition. At the age of eighty six, Lynn Conway literally changed the world. All of us owe her a debt. If you've ever used a smartphone or an iPhone, you literally have Linn Conway to thank for that, and

her contributions were almost overlooked and were devalued. Specifically because of her identity. Lynn Conway had a big hand in contributing to the modern day internet and smartphones, and honestly because of good old fashioned transphobia, her contributions were almost overlooked completely even though she changed the world. Conway was born in nineteen thirty eight and assigned male at birth, but from a very early age, Lynn Conway knew that there was more to her story as it pertains to gender.

Her mom was studying anthropology at Columbia, and Lynn, as a child would flip through her mom's textbooks looking for answers telling Michigan engineering news. In a really lovely profile of her life that Will linked to in the show notes quote, it seemed like people in other cultures had found different ways to deal with what I knew I was feeling, But then that became scrambled with the thought that what I was feeling was that I was gay,

but nobody ever talked about those things. When Lynn was fourteen, she read a news story about former Army private Christine Jorgensen, who was known for being the first person in the United States to publicly announce a gender transition. When Conway

saw this, she knew immediately what she wanted to do. Now, keep in mind it was the fifties, and given what we know about how narrowly society was dealing with and talking about gender and identity in the fifties and sixties, you have to wonder, you know, what was Conway's coming of age and her journey really like, Conway initially tried to transition while studying at MIT in the nineteen fifties. She began taking hormones on her own and asked a friend in the medical school at MIT if he could

help her find a doctor who could actually help her transition. Unfortunately, that friend kind of sold her out. That friend took her to a dean who told her that if she did not stop taking hormones, she could be put in a mental institution. Fear of being institutionalized or arrested was a huge concern for Lynn Conway because being trans was commonly strongly associated with being mentally ill or criminal behavior.

If you were openly trans you could end up institutionalized or even arrested in some places, which looking forward to today, it's one of the reasons why when people try to equate transness with being mentally ill or criminal behavior, you know, it's just more of the same, and it's just that much more sad and infuriating that those are still things that transphobes evoke to this day. So after this disappointing turn of events for Lynn at MIT, she kind of

put transitioning at the back of her mind. She got married, she became a parent, and she started working at IBM. At this time in her life, she kind of seemed to have a picture perfect life from the outside. That is, you know, she was making major professional moves and innovations and computing design at IBM, which at the time was the seventh largest corporation in the entire world. While she was at IBM, by all accounts, she was kicking ass.

She invented a hardware protocol that enabled the out of order command processing that most computers still rely on to this day. But all of this was put in jeopardy because of transphobia. That would alter the trajectory of her life.

with him. So what's kind of heartbreaking about all of this is that, according to this profile in Michigan Engineering, Conway and her then spouse had worked out like a pretty solid plan together for how conway transitioning would work. Their plan was that they would get a divorce and that Conway would start working with doctor Benjamin to transition. Conway would pay for child support from her IBM salary

and stay in the children's lives. They actually even worked out what the children would call her, which was they would call her aunt. And according to a really compelling Forbes piece by Jeremy Alessandri, Conway's immediate family and IBM's divisional management were actually pretty accepting and supportive of this at first. However, when IBM's corporate medical director learned that Conway was planning to try transition in nineteen sixty eight.

He told CEO Thomas J. Watson Junior, who fired Conway, to avoid the public embarrassment of employing a trans woman. So this moment, you know, getting fired from your big important job that you are kicking ass at and losing the support of your employer began a downward spiral in Conway's life that was completely destabilizing. She had a divorce from her spouse while also losing her source of income,

which made it that much more difficult. California's social services even tried to keep her away from her children, and Conway's ex spouse decided that she could not have any contact with the children because she was worried that if Conway was actually in the kid's life, they would be risking having those kids removed by the state. At the time, Conway's kids were just babies, two years old and four years old. This was absolutely devastating for Lynn Conway. She

recalls that poured me up. Let me tell you, the hardest part of the whole thing was that I felt like mom to them, She told Michigan Engineering. Lynn knew this was going to be a tough process, and she relied on lessons that she had learned from a lifetime love of the outdoors and outdoor adventures like canoeing and rock climbing to steady herself for the challenges to come. As she described it, now, I had a plan to get across the river. I could see the steps I'd

have to take to make it. I could see the dangers and how to protect against them. The only problem was I didn't know where I'd end up on the other side. So even though it cost her her family, her career, and her kids, she continued to work with doctor Benjamin to transition. It was not an easy road,

as a lot of trans folks will tell you. The logistics, you know, things like changing your name, getting new identification and paperwork can be a big part of navigating trans identity, you know, just establishing yourself so that you can work and earn an income, have a bank account, and get a place to live. Conway was dealing with all of

this decades ago. But even today this process is complicated and sometimes prohibitively expensive, and sadly, today a lot of trans folks do not have the support or resources to navigate it. According to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, only one fifth of trans people who have transitioned have been able to update all of their IDs and records, and one third haven't been able to update any of their ideas and records. So it is a real problem with

a lot of barriers. Luckily, Lynn was able to use connections that doctor Benjamin had in Oakland to get this navigated quickly, which was really important for her because she's written that she wanted to avoid suspicion because that suspicion could quickly turn unsafe. Conway wrote, you were an undocumented alien from Mars. You don't have a birth certificate. How are you going to get a job? This was the sixties. You could think of it like being a spy in

a foreign country. If you were found out, you'd be dealt with immediately, if not by the police, then by people on the streets. So it's probably pretty clear that why after transitioning, Conway would go into what she has called the stealth phase of her career. So it's nineteen sixty nine. Conway has changed her name and she's hiding her gender identity and starting to look for work and computing, eventually finding a job as a contract programmer and later

working at Memorrecks. But then she landed what is sort of like the big job, like nailing the big account in her life, which is getting a job at Xerox pallow Alto Research Center, which was a massively huge deal. Again, like she does, Lynn Conway just starts kicking ass professionally, just like she had done at IBM before being fired for being trans. During this time, she had many of her biggest accomplishments. Her work completely revolutionized how microchips were designed.

Lynn Conway is sometimes called the hidden Hand for her work because so much of her work led to the tech revolution in the nineteen eighties and again is the reason why we had things like personal computers and smartphones. But even while accomplishing all of these massively important and lasting innovations, she could didn't really own them because of

her identity. In a piece that she wrote for The Huffington Post, Conway describes her stealth mode phase in life, where she just kind of purposely stayed behind the scenes despite creating these big innovations that literally changed the world. During this time, Lynn Conway's trans identity was not public knowledge. She only disclosed this to close friends, HR administrators and

security clearance administrators. She purposely kind of made herself scarce and always was sure to stay behind the scenes, hence that nickname the hidden Hand, and that meant that a lot of her accomplishments and innovations, even while they were huge, also went unnoticed. She has talked about this time in her life as kind of feeling like a Cold War spy, saying, you have to operate at a pretty high level pretty quickly, or else you'll get exposed and then you're a traitor

to the whole institution, she told The Independent. But at the same time, you have to be kind of affable and not attract attention. You can't get angry or show fear. So she wasn't really able to be her full self at work, even as she was contributing to all of these historic, lasting innovations and technological developments. But she couldn't

even really be herself and own those developments. And honestly, this is a dynamic that is bad for all of us because we end up truly not knowing our own history, you know. Transphobia almost kept us from having a full accounting of this important tech history Conway's contribution started becoming

made public almost by accident. So in nineteen ninety nine, a computer historian began investigating her early innovations at IBM, which tipped her off that other people were actually taking credit for her work at IBM, and she wanted to correct the record, but in order to do so, she would need to open up about her identity and explain why somebody with a different name had made all of these big contributions and that they were out there saying

that they were actually hers. She wanted to clear up this confusion, so she ended up telling this computer historian and then quietly adding a section to her website with the headline gender Transition. And this decision is what really sparked the next chapter of her life as an advocate for trans rights. So something that I love about Lyn Conway's legacy is that after this point in her life, she becomes this vocal advocate for other trans people in tech.

She has given financial support and assistance to many transwomen going through transition, and she also has been an advocate for employment protections for trans folks. And she was doing this, you know, continuing this legacy of trying to make improvements for other trans folks in tech pretty shortly before she died. The kind of advocacy that she's done for trans folks

in tech has a lasting impact even today. In twenty thirteen, Conway and Leandravicki of the University of North Carolina successfully lobbied the Board of Directors at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which is essentially like a code of ethics for the engineering profession to include trans folks, which impacts the world's largest engineering professional society. Conway's website also

served as a beacon for trans folks. According to The Independent, for years her personal website was one of the few places you could find clear, detailed, unprejudiced information about the experience of being trans and the process of transition, as well as striking examples of how trans people could find lasting happiness and success. The Independent spoke to a woman named Rebecca, a fifty one year old government worker in Colorado, who was quoted as saying, it was the early two thousands.

My relationship with my girlfriend was falling apart. I was having a hard time containing the feelings I had when I was younger about the need to transition. Her site wasn't the first one I found, but when I did find it, it opened up a whole new world to me, and I knew I wasn't alone. So Lynn Conway is

basically this world changing technological badass. So I think we can all agree that IBM really messed up by firing her because she was trans and after fifty years of silence on this issue, in twenty twenty October, IBM invited staff to an event that they called tech Trailblazer and transgender pioneery Lynn Conway in conversation with Diane Gearson. Gearson was IBM's senior vice president of Human Resources. The event starts with a formal apology to Lynn Conway for her

transphobic firing fifty two years earlier. Conway was struggling to hold back tears. Not only did IBM apologize, but they also recognized her immense contributions to IBM's work that had

gone unattributed. Darie O'Gill, director of IBM Research, presented Lynn Conway with a Lifetime Achievement Award, given to individuals who have changed the world through tech innovations, and gil noted that Lynn's extraordinary technical achievements helped define the modern computing industry, and that she paid the way for how we design and make computing ships today, and that she forever changed

microelectronic devices and people's lives. This is really important. IBM acknowledged that after Conway was fired back in nineteen sixty eight, that her research still aided IBM successes. In nineteen sixty five, Lynn created the architectural Level Advanced Computing System one simulator and invented a method that led to the development of a superscalar computer. This dynamic instruction schedule invention was later

used at computer chips, greatly improving their performance. And none of this would be possible without Lynn Conway, and these continued contributions just went unacknowledged for decades because of bias. More after a.

So I don't want to take anything away from that of the event, Lynn Conway said, instead of just being a resolution of what had happened to me in nineteen sixty eight, it became a heartfelt group celebration of how far we've come since then. And I guess I'm just really happy that Lynn Conway got to have that official apology on their record, have it be acknowledged by the company that did her dirty decades earlier, that she was an innovator that helped them to have future success, even

after they fired her so cruelly because of her identity. Like, I'm so happy that they did not wait to do that after her death, that they did that in a way that could really include her while she was here, you know. Of the apology, Conway said that it brought closure to a really dark period in her life that being fired kicked off. She said, quote even better, as I've made friend after friend among today's ibmers, It's felt like I was coming home home to an IBM that's

also come very far since nineteen sixty eight. In lin Conway's later years, she did a two year stint working on machine intelligence at the Department of Defense. After that, she retired from working in tech and went into teaching. She became an Associate dean for instruction and Instructional Technology at the University of Michigan in nineteen eighty five, where

she worked until retiring in nineteen ninety eight. So after retiring from teaching in ninety eight, it honestly sounds like she spent her time after that just enjoying a really beautiful life. She was married to Charlie Rodgers. She had two children, four grandchildren, and six great grandchildren. Before her death, she lived on twenty four beautiful acres of meadow marsh and woodlands and rural Michigan, where her and her husband

spent their time exploring and playing in the outdoors. And she was still engaging in activism around trans writes right up until her death. And I'm so pleased that she got to enjoy such a full, rich life, because trans people deserve to live full lives that account for their contributions and brilliance, regardless of where they are on that journey.

A big part of Lynn Conway's personal journey was about her transition and trans folks deserve to live full lives that account for their contributions and brilliant regardless of where they are on a personal journey of transition. You know,

transition means many different things to many different people. It can mean personal or medical or legal steps, things like just telling one's friends or families or coworkers using a different name, establishing pronouns, dressing a certain way, or changing your name on a legal documents, which, as we've discussed, can be prohibitively expensive for many people, and trans folks deserve to live full lives even if they are not able to take those steps the way that Lynn Conway did.

I'm really happy and grateful that Conway had that connection to doctor Benjamin who could help her navigate transition. But not everyone has the resources, access or support. And I think Lynn Conway's story is a good example of how living history it's all around us, and that we can't let sexist, racist, and transphobic systems erase the accomplishments of marginalized people. Because there's a version of this story where we don't know about Lynn Conway's legacy and how she

contributed to all of our lives. So when I found out about Lyn Conway and her story. I almost felt kind of personally negligent that this was somebody who had accomplished so much, who had basically given us technology that I use every day today, whose name and story I

didn't even know about. And it really allowed me to see the ways that bias can obscure the stories of traditionally marginalized people, even if you're someone who was actively trying to see those stories like undertold or overlooked stories and technology are obviously my jam and I didn't know her story, so part of me wanted to really write this personal wrong by doing everything I could to make sure that more people knew Lynn Conway's name and knew

her story and knew what she had given all of us. And I wanted people to know that while she was still alive. So I have talked about Lynn Conway's story on several different podcasts. Maybe you've heard some of them. And something that I loved about making those podcasts about her life was getting to the end where I feel like in a lot of stories, who hear about her death or something like that, and getting to instead say

Lynn Conway is still very much alive. You can follow Lynn Conway on Twitter, where she's very active, you know, getting to really honor her while she was here. And a funny thing is is that I know that she actually got to hear some of those podcasts because she got in touch with me before her death. In April of twenty twenty three, after one of those podcasts aired, she sent me a LinkedIn message saying, a friend just shared the wonderful podcast you posted in January twenty twenty two. Wow,

you captured it ever so coolly. I'd really enjoy connecting on LinkedIn for the long term so I can follow your adventures as you and all your friends work to tune up this messed up world. All the best, Linn. It was such a sweet, affirming message of hope and resilience. And again, I think it shows that LGBTQ history isn't just something happening long ago. It's happening right now, right here,

all around us. And if there's someone whose legacy you want to honor, you don't have to wait until they're no longer here to do that. You can honor their present. In what is believed to be her last interview with The Independent, Lynn looked back on her legacy, saying I think a lot of us trans people are living more interesting,

more fun lives than most people. It's our secret. We're highly empowered in ways that people may not understand because of the joyfulness we feel in having been able to do what we do in spite of the difficulties and find a place in society where we actually have joy in just living. Conway's death was announced on Tuesday by the University of Michigan, which said that she passed away

on June ninth, twenty twenty four. Michael Hiltick, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times who was a friend of Lynn for twenty five years, said that she was the bravest person that he ever knew. IBM also honored her legacy after death, saying, during a truly impressive life, Lynn Conway broke down barriers for the trans community and pushed the limits of technology through revolutionary work that is still

impacting our lives to this day. IBM Chief Human Resources Officer Nicol Lamreau said this in a statement to Axios. We are humbled by her continuous examples of grace and her advocacy for others. Honestly thinking about IBM, I am so glad that they righted their historic wrong in firing Conway for being trans. I mean, there's a reality where they never took accountability and probably would not have been able to acknowledge that they had this brilliant mind making

all of these historic contributions for them, you know. Or maybe they would have announced it in a statement after she died. And if they had not apologized in twenty twenty and acknowledged this, what would that have looked like? I imagine either they would have to keep quiet or risk people really calling them out on social media being like, yeah, don't try to give her flowers now, and y'all fired

her and never apologized for it. So I am glad that they made that apology because it sounds like that allowed for them to adequately honor her legacy in her death in a way that I don't think they would have been able to do had they never apologized. Lynn Conway's story is one of resilience and also a story of how things like transphobia harm trans people and stifle

tech innovation. You know how many trans technologists are being shut out of education and jobs because of bias today, and how many generations of role models in tech are we missing out on I'm so glad that Lynn Conway was a light that other folks could look to in terms of being able to imagine the kinds of lives and futures that are possible. Lynn Conway didn't just have the ability to imagine new technologies that didn't yet exist,

but new realities and new futures too. Lynn lived to be eighty six and there were probably times where she thought she would not get to have a full, rich future that she got to enjoy. And I want that for everybody, all of our trans siblings, to get to be able to dream about a full color future that you also get to experience. As Lynn put it herself in her piece for huff Post. Bottom line, if you want to change the future, start living like you're already there.

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