Lynn Conway, trailblazing trans computer scientist, dies at 85

[Freija]

From our computers, smartphones and tablets, let’s all take a minute to thank Lynn Conway for without her contributions to the world of microchip design, we probably wouldn’t be where we are today? At one point she even worked for DARPA, everyone’s favorite government organization loved by conspiracy theorists everywhere.

Conway died from a heart condition at her home in Jackson, Michigan, on June 9, 2024, at the age of 86. Her husband, Charles Rogers, reported that she passed away due to a heart condition. He was by her side during her passing. “I was by her side the entire time, and was holding her hand when she passed,” he said. “I don’t know what I will do without the love of my life.”

The best comprehensive quick read of her life and accomplishments can be found at Wikipedia Lynn Conway. If you’ve never heard of this amazing person, what she accomplished and what she went through, it is well worth a read.

Who was Lynn Conway?

Born in White Plains, New York in 1938 , Lynn Conway’s early life was defined by crippling gender dysphoria, which she began experiencing at a young age.

She entered MIT in 1955 but ultimately dropped out over her attempt to transition between 1957-58, which was incredibly difficult due to the hostile anti-LGBTQ+ climate of the 1950s.

After living in San Francisco for several years, she enrolled at Columbia University in 1961, where she received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical engineering after graduating two years later.

Conway was eventually recruited by IBM in Menlo Park California – eventually dubbed Silicon Valley – to work on various projects, including what would become the world’s fastest supercomputer at the time.

Things became sour, however, after she attempted to transition following a consultation with pioneering gender-affirming care researcher Harry Benjamin, who revolutionised trans-healthcare in the 1960s.

Despite initially being supportive of Conway’s transition, even changing her name on company records, IBM eventually made the decision to fire her based on her gender identity alone.

On the decision by IBM, Conway told the LA Times in 2020 that she was nonjudgmental about having been let go.

Far be it from being discouraged from the hiccup, Conway eventually made her way back into the computer engineering industry, completely obscuring her identity and past as a way to work in the field without judgement.

By the 1970s, Conway had quickly climbed the ranks across computer engineering and was eventually recruited by Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1973.

There, she made some of her biggest contributions to microchip design and research, worked with MIT graduates on co-authoring a book on revolutionary processing research, and taught an experimental course on Very Large Scale Integrated chip design (VSLI).

With her contributions to the field continuing up to and into the 1980s, she was recruited by the Department of Defense as an assistant director for strategic computing, where she spearheaded research into machine intelligence technology.

She eventually settled into an academia job as professor emerita of electrical engineering a computer science at the University of Michigan, where she stayed until retiring in 1999.

Pink News

Conway was initiated in 1989 into the National Academy of Engineering, and last year was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.


Read more at LGBTQ Nation (I promise you won't catch the ghey)

Conway is considered a "trans pioneer" but she didn't really come out publicly as trans until around 1999 having lived "stealth" before that. At one point she was involved in some controversy and was part of a coalition that made some pretty brutal attacks against a certain author that published a book they didn't like because it supported the theory of Ray Blanchard's two-type AGP/HSTS typology that is still debated today (although not by the trans conglomerate that still discounts the whole thing).

At any rate, we all own a little thanks to Lynn Conway. RIP.

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Ya can't judge a book by its cover. Wow, never heard of her till now. Super tech brains & determination. Damn, in the 50s!

I tripled VPN'd my connection before clickin the LGBTQ Nation just to be safe.


Kidding.

This excerpt jumped out to me:

“Chips used to be designed by drawing them with paper and pencil like an architect’s blueprints in the pre-digital era,” Bertacco wrote. “Conway’s work developed algorithms that enabled our field to use software to arrange millions, and later billions, of transistors on a chip.”

Oh yea, my favorite agency, DARPA. Gotta be a special breed of brains to get recruited. She certainly fits the bill of wizard.

Quote from your wiki link:

As sociologist Thomas Streeter discusses in The Net Effect when commenting on Conway's DARPA job:

"By taking this job, Conway was demonstrating that she was no antiwar liberal. (In response to critics, she has said, 'if you have to fight, and sometimes you must in order to deal with bad people, history tells us that it really helps to have the best weapons available'). But Conway carried a sense of computers as tools for horizontal communications that she had absorbed at PARC right into DARPA – at one of the hottest moments of the cold war."

I like her attitude. RIP.