The role of transgendered and bisexuals in technology.

[DebbieL]

It's no coincidence that there were a substantial number of transgendered, gay, and bisexuals who actively helped to establish the internet. Even before there was an "Internet", Unix administrators used usenet newsgroups to share technical information, but very soon after that, socially oriented groups sprang up, and motss (members of the same sex) for gay, lesbian, and bisexuals and women (for gender related issues) became a popular place for transgendered men and women to get information from others of their kind.

Back in the 1960s, cross-dressing was illegal in most states, in the 1970s, movies about transexuals such as the Christine Jorgensen Story, Myra Breckenridge, and one or two others were still more sensationalist than informative. For example, in Myra, Raquel Welch played the female persona and Rex Reed played the male persona - and Myra did many things that were interesting fantasies, but not particularly supportive of the transgendered community.

As a teen-ager in the 1960's, I searched 30 different public libraries for ANY information about boys who wanted to be girls, or sex changes, or anything related to how to handle transgender issues, and there was nothing available.

As a child, even 9 and 10 years old, I attempted numerous times to discuss my desire to be female, to be one of the girls, with psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists - who refused to even allow me to start the discussion.

Even when I was 21 and in group therapy 5 days a week, I was not allowed to discuss my gender identity issues.

It was only when I was in my 30s, when I was in marriage counciling, that a therapist encouraged me to discuss my transgender issues. He had actual experience working with other transgendered men and warned both me and my wife NOT to try and "kill debbie", because the results were usually very bad.

There is much more known and available - but so much of that has been a result of transgendered people sharing via newsgroups and other BBS systems. Today, there are real and effective studies of the entire spectrum of transgendered people. Not only has transgendered behavior gone from being a criminal behavior to a disease, to a fundamental part of a person's personality, but researchers are learning that suppression of transgendered identity has led to high levels of teen suicide, especially among teen-age boys who see puberty as a death sentence for their female identities.

The availability of tweets, facebook activity, and other details of people's personal information has made it much easier to study what was going on in a young person's head before they died. They have discovered that a remarkably high number of male teen suicides are directly tied to SUPPRESSION of sexual preference and sexual identity.

Web based technology provides a level of security, anonymity, and relative privacy - which provides a "safe place" for the transgendered and their families to share with each other. This site is an excellent example. I'm very glad it's available.

[Debra Russell]

Yes the roll of internet availability to trans issues has really made a difference in my life on many levels -- I have found more acceptance than I ever imagined --- it's really a place to connect and align your perspective, and I am thankful to you all.............Debra

[SweetIonis]

This is a great thread. For one thing I have been really impressed by the level of intelligence of some of the people who post here. I honestly didn't expect that. I think that, more than anything else has kept me coming here. Any rate, I ran across this a few weeks ago. I think she is totally awesome. Real cute too, I might add!

Lynn Conway



Lynn Conway (born January 10, 1938) is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer, inventor, trans woman, and activist for the transgender community.

Conway is notable for a number of pioneering achievements, including the Mead & Conway revolution in VLSI design, which incubated an emerging electronic design automation industry. She worked at IBM in the 1960s and is credited with the invention of generalised dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance.

Early life and education

Born and raised as a boy, Conway grew up in White Plains, New York. Although shy and experiencing gender dysphoria as a child, she became fascinated and engaged by astronomy (building a 6-inch (150 mm) reflector telescope one summer) and did well in math and science in high school. Conway entered MIT in 1955, earning high grades there. She attempted a gender transition in 1957-8, but this effort failed due to the medical climate at the time, and Conway left MIT in despair. After working as an electronics technician for several years, Conway resumed her education at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, earning her B.S. and M.S.E.E. degrees in 1962 and 1963.[7][8]
[edit] Early research at IBM

Conway was recruited by IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York in 1964. She was soon selected to join the architecture team designing an advanced supercomputer, working alongside John Cocke, Herbert Schorr, Ed Sussenguth, Fran Allen and other IBM researchers on the Advanced Computing Systems (ACS) project, inventing multiple-issue out-of-order dynamic instruction scheduling while working there.[1][9][3][4][5][6][10][11][12] The Computer History Museum has stated that "the ACS machines appears to have been the first superscalar design, a computer architectural paradigm widely exploited in modern high-performance microprocessors."[3][4][5][6][11][12]
[edit] Gender transition

After learning of the pioneering research of Dr. Harry Benjamin in transgender treatment and realizing that a full gender transition was now possible, Conway sought his help and became his patient. After suffering from severe depression over her situation, Conway contacted Dr. Benjamin, who agreed to counsel her and prescribe hormones. Under Dr. Benjamin's care, she began preparing for transition.[13]

While struggling with life in a male role,[13] Conway had been married to a woman and had two children. Under the legal constraints of the day, she was denied access to their children when she transitioned.[13]

Although she hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed to them that she was transsexual, and was planning on transitioning to a female gender role.
[edit] Career as computer scientist

On completing her transition in 1968, Conway took a new name and identity, and restarted her career in "stealth-mode" as a contract programmer at Computer Applications, Inc. She went on to work at Memorex during 1969–1972 as a digital system designer and computer architect.[13][14]

Conway joined Xerox PARC in 1973, where she led the "LSI Systems" group under Bert Sutherland.[15][16] Collaborating with Carver Mead of Caltech on VLSI design methodology, she co-authored Introduction to VLSI Systems, a groundbreaking work that would soon become a standard textbook in chip design, used in over 100 universities by 1983.[9][17] The book and early courses were the beginning of the Mead & Conway revolution in VLSI system design.[18]

In 1978, Conway served as visiting associate professor of EECS at MIT, teaching a now famous VLSI design course based on a draft of the Mead–Conway text.[13] The course validated the new design methods and textbook, and established the syllabus and instructor’s guidebook used in later courses all around the world.[19]

Among Conway’s contributions were invention of dimensionless, scalable design rules that greatly simplified chip design and design tools,[8][3][4][20] and invention of a new form of internet-based infrastructure for rapid-prototyping and short-run fabrication of large numbers of chip designs.[3][4][21] The new infrastructure was institutionalized as the MOSIS system in 1981. Since then, MOSIS has fabricated more than 50,000 circuit designs for commercial firms, government agencies, and research and educational institutions around the world.[22] Prominent VLSI researcher Charles Seitz commented that “MOSIS represented the first period since the pioneering work of Eckert and Mauchley on the ENIAC in the late 1940s that universities and small companies had access to state-of-the-art digital technology.”[21]

The research methods used to develop the Mead–Conway VLSI design methodology and the MOSIS prototype are documented in a 1981 Xerox report[23] and the Euromicro Journal.[24] The impact of the Mead–Conway work is described and time-lined in a number of historical overviews of computing.[21][25][26][27][28] Conway and her colleagues have compiled an online archive of original papers that documents much of that work.[29][30]

In the early 1980s, Conway left Xerox to join DARPA, where she was a key architect of the Defense Department's Strategic Computing Initiative, a research program studying high-performance computing, autonomous systems technology, and intelligent weapons technology.[8]

Conway joined the University of Michigan in 1985 as professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and associate dean of engineering. There she worked on "visual communications and control probing for basic system and user-interface concepts as applicable to hybridized internet/broadband-cable communications".[8] She retired from active teaching and research in 1998, as professor emerita at Michigan.[31]
[edit] Transgender activism

When nearing retirement, Conway learned that the story of her early work at IBM might soon be revealed through the investigations of Mark Smotherman that were being prepared for a 2001 publication.[1] She began quietly coming out in 1999 to friends and colleagues about her past gender transition,[32][33] using her personal website to tell the story in her own words.[7] Her story was then more widely reported in 2000 in profiles in Scientific American[9] and the Los Angeles Times.[13]

After going public with her story, she began work in transgender activism, intending to "illuminate and normalize the issues of gender identity and the processes of gender transition." She has worked to protect and expand the rights of transgendered people. She has provided direct and indirect assistance to numerous other transsexual women going through transition and maintains a well-known website providing emotional and medical resources and advice. Parts have been translated into most of the world's major languages.[34] She maintains a listing of many successful post-transition transsexual people, to, in her words "provide role models for individuals who are facing gender transition." Her website also provides current news related to transgender issues and information on sex reassignment surgery for transsexual women, facial feminization surgery, academic inquiries into the prevalence of transsexualism[35] and transgender/transsexual issues in general.[36][37]

Conway has been a prominent critic of the Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence theory of male-to-female transsexualism that all transsexual women are motivated either by feminine homosexuality or autogynephilia.[38] She was also a key person in the campaign against J. Michael Bailey's controversial book The Man Who Would Be Queen.[39][40] Conway and others filed a complaint with Northwestern University accusing Bailey of practicing clinical psychology without a license,[41] and witnessed a complaint by a trans woman accusing Bailey of having sex with a research subject.[42] Benedict Carey wrote an article in which he observed that "the controversy had a life of its own on the Internet."[38] Northwestern University professor Alice Dreger published an article about the controversy, in which she concluded that the campaign against Bailey was an attempt to ruin Bailey's reputation and career by making various false accusations against him.[40] Conway called Dreger's article "one-sided" and complained that its publication, and Carey's article, reflected pro-Bailey bias by the Archives of Sexual Behavior and The New York Times.[43]

Conway was a cast member in the first all-transgender performance of The Vagina Monologues, in Los Angeles in 2004,[44] and appeared in a LOGO-Channel documentary film about that event entitled Beautiful Daughters.[32][45] She has also strongly advocated for equal opportunities and employment protections for transgender people in high-technology industry,[2][46][47][48][49][50] and for elimination of the pathologization of transgender people by the psychiatric community.[51][52]

In 2009, Conway was named one of the "Stonewall 40 trans heroes" on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots by the International Court System, one of the oldest and largest predominantly gay organizations in the world, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.[53][54]
[edit] Home life

In 1987, Conway met her husband Charlie, a professional engineer who shares her interest in the outdoors, including canoeing and motocross.[13] They soon started living together, and bought a house with 24 acres (97,000 m2) of meadow, marsh, and woodland in rural Michigan in 1994.[13] In 2002, they were married.[10][32]
[edit] Awards and honors

Conway has received a number of awards and distinctions:

Electronics Magazine 1981 Award for Achievement[55]
Pender Award of the Moore School, University of Pennsylvania, 1984[56]
IEEE EAB Major Educational Innovation Award, 1984[57]
Fellow of the IEEE, 1985, "for contributions to VLSI technology"[58]
Wetherill Medal of the Franklin Institute, 1985[59]
Secretary of Defense Meritorious Civilian Service Award, May 1985[31][60]
Member of the National Academy of Engineering, 1989[61]
National Achievement Award, Society of Women Engineers, 1990[62]
Presidential Appointment to the United States Air Force Academy Board of Visitors, 1996[63]
Honorary Doctorate, Trinity College, 1998[64]
Electronic Design Hall of Fame, 2002[65]
Engineer of the Year, National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientific and Technical Professionals, 2005[66]
Named one of the "Stonewall 40 trans heroes" by the ICS and NGLTF, 2009.[53][54]
Computer Pioneer Award, IEEE Computer Society, 2009[3][4]

[Kaitlyn Michele]

and it's medical technology (FFS, SRS, HRT) that allows us to more effectively deal with GID..

[DebbieL]

I've noticed, as I read the biography of other transgendered MTFs that there seems to be an unusually intense interest in science and technology. Perhaps this is because when we were kids, we wanted to be one of the girls, but we couldn't because we were boys, and since our hearts weren't really in it, we found persuits we could do alone, or without gender roles. Given the choice between being a book-worm or a nerd and being a sissy who gets beat up by the boys and can't date a girl, we opt for the active isolation of science, technology, research, and abstract thought. As transgendered, we are in constant conflict with the established norms and stereotypes. As a result, we tend to challenge all conventional thinking and think out of the box. We spend our whole lives searching for the solution to a conundrum, a riddle which can never be solved. We struggle with various interim solutions, but none are satisfactory. We find the same experience in our work in technology. What to a GG would be a normal piece of clothing, such a a bra, has a great deal more meaning to us, especially when we go through the experience of that first bra many times, rather than just once.

As transgendered boys, we look for alternatives to violence, strategies based on feminine solutions, and ways to get more done with fewer resources. For us, it's not having the biggest, or most powerful, or strongest, but rather, the carefully applied use of just the right amount of energy to create the desired result. It's not about winning and losing, but on finding solutions where everybody wins.

[Suzette Muguet de Mai]

Could it be as simple as discovering your true self and then to you are true. Solving the fundamental laws of the universe is really solving your own universe. As a non practicing scientist I wonder if the patience and understanding of the student years allows one to see more from within than from afar. To spend hours attempting to solve problems, replicating experiments, researching and reading alone enables one to delve deep within to alert ones inner being that I am not who I am but someone who is to be in another form.

In so doing, one is therefore able to deduct through simple reasoning that one is indeed different.

Maybe? I still wonder why cupboards are made with depth when the item I want is always at the back, and hardly ever at the front. Damn I waste so much time looking. Simple solution: make the cupboards shallower but take up more area. Have I lost the point?

[Tara D. Rose]

I never would have thought that.

[Eryn]

DebbieL, that is an interesting insight that resonates strongly with me. You've given me another way to look at myself...

[Gaby2]

Thankyou for pointing out these points, Debbie.
The same to SweetIonis and Kaitlyn.
Gaby