Lynn Conway, leading computer scientist and transgender pioneer, dies at 85
Lynn Conway, leading computer scientist and transgender pioneer, dies at 85
Lynn Conway, who died Sunday at 85, was a leader in the development of personal computers and microprocessor technology, and a symbol for generations of transgender individuals.
I have mixed feelings on the pronoun use, but having read some of her autobiographical writing I don't think she would have taken much issue with it. This piece is more focused on her work in computer engineering, so I felt it was appropriate to post here.
I have mixed feelings on the pronoun use, but having read some of her autobiographical writing I don't think she would have taken much issue with it.
It's fine how they've used it because it's referring to the time before transition, so it's just being accurate and also means the story makes more sense.
A lot of trans people would disagree. Just because someone was forced to conform to their biological sex for years doesn't mean they felt that way on the inside.
Every trans person I know, without exception, prefers to refer to their pre-transition selves by their current pronouns and would take issue with the suggestion that they were still a boy/girl before becoming a girl/boy.
One analogy to consider is when someone comes out of the closet as non-hetero.
Say you know a man called Joe Schmoe who used to live "in the closet" but eventually came out and said he was gay, he'd always been gay, and he's ready to publicly proclaim his sexuality. You wouldn't then look at a photo of Joe taken back before he came out and say "this is a picture of heterosexual Joe Schmoe" because he wasn't heterosexual, he was a gay man who wasn't yet able to outwardly live that particular truth. Past Joe was still gay, not straight, and it remains correct to refer to him as gay no matter when in his life you're talking about. The error of his previous misidentification has been corrected, and his labels thoroughly (and retroactively) updated to reflect that.
Similarly, it's correct to always refer to a trans person as their true gender, preferred pronouns, and preferred name, even if you're referring to a time in their life when they were not yet living that truth. Lynn Conway was correctly identified as a woman with she/her pronouns, and this article does her a disservice through its mixed-up pronoun use.
can confirm
Agreed, this is generally true, though personally as a trans woman, I prefer to refer to my child self with gender neutral terms. Others can refer to my child self with my current pronouns, or with gender neutral pronouns.
Why make a big deal about it? Have you ever considered that if the writer respects Conwyay, then the writer is doing what she wanted?
I know there is variance among the community. Of my three trans friends 2 prefere being referred to by their post transition gender in the past tense and once preferes they/them.
A coworker who came out requested he/him until after they took time off for treatment and then she/her afterwards.
When asked if he wanted his name updated on an award plaque while away he said no. So when she returned we had only updated her door name plate and info in the company directory.
What they "felt on the inside" is not the same as what they actually were at the time though. Referring to them as he or she is just a statement of fact at the time.
We had this same thing when Ellen Page became Elliot Page. Then there was an attempt to retroactively change all references and make them Elliot Page, even though the work he did before was as Ellen Page.
It's not transphobic to acknowledge the person they were before transition.
Trans person here. I vehemently disagree and would find this treatment exceptionally disrespectful.
I transitioned at 17 though; referring to someone who transitioned later in life can be somewhat different.
I'm okay with it too. It adds context. If they referred to her as "she" describing the period she was a married father with kids it could be confusing.
You're right, very weird use of pronouns in the obituary. I can only imagine that most of it was lifted from the article from 2000. That doesn't excuse misgendering someone, they could have updated it for 2024.
Some people see their pre-transition selves as being one gender, and only use their post-transition gender to inform their new pronouns later. It was written by a person that interviewed her and apparently held her in high respect. All we can see is that there is an abrupt change in the pronouns, where Lynn presumably could have considered herself to match the new pronouns. We don't know without asking her if she was misgendered by the article, and we are a bit late for that.
Yes, I have no clue how she felt about the article from 2000, and obviously reading it with a 2024 lens is not fair to the original author. I am happy for her that the obituary didn't deadname her like the original article did, and hope that she would have been ok with the pronouns used the way they did pre/post transition.
Because there's several comment chains about the use of pronouns and I wasn't quite sure where to add this, I decided to do a top level comment. She wrote an autobiographical retrospective of her transition on her University of Michigan faculty page twenty years ago about a transition that started long before that (and her main faculty page is a fascinating time capsule of trans history). When I came out as trans in 2012 her page was already a bit dated and the start of my transition, as I experienced it, was firmly in the bad old days. Conway was part of a much older generation of trans people, and there were narratives we had to force ourselves into in order to access healthcare, especially the ideas that we always knew and the idea of being born in the wrong body, and (in her generation but not mine) the idea that you had to be heterosexual post-transition. For some, it fit well enough, but for others it was an act for the doctors just to get life saving healthcare.
The obituary I posted reads like it was written twenty years ago and would have been incredibly respectful back then. It's narratively in line with the framework of stories trans people had available to explain their lived experiences in the generation Lynn Conway was part of, and ones that Conway herself used extensively in her autobiographical work. I'm glad public understanding has grown and the narrative frameworks available have expanded. I feel like the obituary is in line with her own lived experiences as she understood them.
Thanks for posting her faculty page, I hope anyone who feels conflicted about the obituary reads it! It sounds like the obituary author knew her well and wrote from a place of mutual understanding and respect.
I cite Conway's Law (and it's reverse corollary) multiple times a week. I'm sorry to hear this, but her contributions were many and 85 is not a bad run. I hope she was happy and fulfilled, in the end.
It's an interesting question as far as dead naming as well. Normally it's just a dick move or an accident because of old habits. But in the case of people who did important work that might be published under an old name it can be useful to get them the credit.
I'm a computer engineer so I looked up her work to see if I was familiar with it. I was wondering if I would need to lookup her dead name to find her important work. In her case her big book (which I recognized immediately and have on my shelf) was published after her transition so it wasn't necessary.
If it had been written pre transition it would have been a shame to not know she was the author.
There's some weirdness on that because she did some important but not-very-public work at IBM in the 60s with their ACS/"Project Y" effort that did what we later call superscalar/multi-issue processors like ...20 years before those terms existed. As part of that she wrote a paper about "Dynamic Instruction Scheduling" in 1966 under her pre-transition identity that is a like retroactive first cause for a bunch of computer architecture ideas.
There was almost nothing about that work in public until Mark Smotherman was doing some history of computing work in the late 90s, put out a call for information about it, and she produced a huge trove of insider information after deciding it was worth exposing the provenance. There's a neat long-form LATimes piece about the situation which is probably the primary source for the history in OP's link.
Fantastic! She was a huge part of the military-industrial complex in computing and her entire work has to be viewed through that lens. While her contributions to the field are numerous and incredibly meaningful, she also wanted to help the military develop machine intelligence and is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children.
If you're serious, please elaborate on your points. I genuinely don't understand.
Going by Wikipedia here,
She was a huge part
Please define huge part. She was a "key architect" in the starting years of a project that fell short of its goals.
her entire work has to be viewed through that lens
Why? It was, relatively speaking, an almost small part of her career. She didn't stay until the end of the project. You even admit that her contributions to the field were many and meaningful.
is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children
This feels like such a huge leap, that I don't even know where to begin tackling it. Is Tim Berners Lee in every explicit way connected to the modern privacy hellscape that is the modern internet?
Make no mistake, if she really did want to help develop artificial intelligence for the military's sake, fuck her. I can respect someone's achievements while also thinking they're trash as a person.
But I don't think that's the case here, and I'm lost as to what point, exactly, you're trying to make.
These are great questions! Rather than pull individual citations, I’ll point you at these books
- Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine
- The Pentagon’s Brain by Annie Jacobson
- The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberg
Your last point, suggesting that it’s possible to take DARPA money without intentionally developing weapons, is part of the whitewashing we’ve done of computing that’s incredibly wrong. Make no mistake, I am directly saying a majority of computing pioneers in the US are trash people while respecting their achievements. Their work was done explicitly under the knowledge it was for military purposes. Levine has a few great anecdotes about engineers watching protestors and asking for extra security.
Your example of Berners-Lee is an interesting one. He’s trash for modern opinions. I don’t know much about the military history, if any, of CERN, so I don’t know their culpability. Conway took DARPA money and architected DARPA projects. That’s her culpability, unless you’re able to show she was coerced and didn’t know about the widely discussed military connections scientists had to know to write their grants for funding?
Edit: fixed the Weinberger link
Sometimes you have to develop defensive or offensive capabilities, and how they’re used are the responsibility of politicians. You’ll have to accept that some citizens support the actions of the politicians to use defensive or offensive capabilities.
If the non-war side has convincing arguments other than shaming based on assumed moral superiority, then they should suggest alternatives for dealing with aggressive sociopaths (Putin attacking Ukraine, for example) or any number of examples of violent extremism in history from [insert your ideological enemy].
Humans are still operating on a primitive model to kill opponents instead of alternative ways to deal with them, and blaming one scientist for that ill of society doesn’t make sense. Her contributions to science are separate from the sociopolitical issues under which they came about.
I have that textbook in a box somewhere