On June 9th, a hero of mine passed away. I'm not one to often call someone a hero, but Lynn Conway absolutely personifies a hero to me. She was 86 years old. If you are not aware, Lynn Conway created the architecture for much of our modern world. After graduating from Columbia University, she got a job at IBM on the Advanced Computing Systems (ACS) project. While at IBM in 1965, she invented dynamic instruction scheduling (DIS), a method for issuing multiple out of order instructions which allowed the supercomputers that developed in the 1990s to be possible. This work was literally decades ahead of its time. What was Ms. Conway's reward for this? In 1968, IBM fired her. They fired her not because of her work, but because Lynn Conway was transgender and in 1968, she was transitioning.
But she wasn't just fired from IBM. She had been married with two kids at the time. That ended in divorce. Not only did Lynn's wife want nothing to do with her, Ms. Conway was barred from having any contact with the kids they were raising. She was brave enough to live authentically, and her reward was getting fired despite inventing a revolutionary computing process. She lost all of her friends and family. It's almost unimaginably cruel.
And yet, despite these obstacles, she started over as her authentic self as a contract programmer "without any experience". She had to do this, because she had already been fired once for being transgender. In order to land this job, she had to do it in a way that no one would ever suspect that she was transgender. She called this stealth mode. Despite the added weight of living in stealth mode, she was far happier than she had ever been before and her work performance was phenomenal. In 1971 she became an architect at Memorex. In 1973 Xerox recruited her to their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) that was just starting. There, she created VLSI (she co-created it, but the concept was hers alone), the microchip architecture that revolutionized the industry to allow for more and more powerful microchips in smaller and smaller sizes and made today's mobile devices possible. She then cowrote the initial textbook on VLSI chip design and taught the initial class at MIT. It was there that her students designed their own microchips and Lynn invented modern ecommerce using an archaic version of the internet to transmit these designs to have the student's chips manufactured. Within two years, universities all over the world began teaching her method of chip design. After this work, she was recruited by the United States Department of Defense so that a program could be started on her work. In 1985 she became a Professor and the Assistant Dean of Engineering at the University of Michigan.
No only did she do all of this work that modern computing was based on, but she did it either while not being able to be her authentic self, or by being her authentic self and having to conceal her past for her safety and career, worried that she would again be fired, persecuted, and not have any civil rights. Either way, she had to carry the weight of not being discovered, either for who she was, or for a previous identity. She did remarry and found the love of her life, Charlie. Despite the worries of being discovered by the outside world, she was extremely happy and fulfilled.
In 1999, after supercomputing took off, people started to research DIS. For years it had been assumed that DIS was an accumulation of years of work. Ms. Conway could not speak up about her invention without risking her career and reputation as it would out her as being transgender. It brought her great anguish that she was not able to step forward and take the credit for her invention. But researchers had started to piece things together and linked Lynn Conway to her pretransition identity at IBM. With the news starting to make waves in professional circles, Lynn came forward publicly as the same person who was at IBM and about her being transgender. Her 31 years in stealth mode had concluded.
For her last quarter century, she became an outspoken advocate for especially transgender rights, but also the rights of all marginalized people with additional focuses on people of color and women. In 2009, she coined the term The Conway Effect. After receiving some major awards in the 1980s for her work on VLSI, Lynn Conway was erased. The Conway Effect builds on the Mathilda Effect which states that women's scientific contributions are often credited to the nearest man working on the same topic. The Conway effect adds that people who are othered - women and people of color of all genders - form a group that society does not expect to make innovations, so they are not given full credit when they do because they are literally overlooked. Lynn Conway and Carver Mead created the textbook for VLSI. It became known as the Mead-Conway method of chip design, despite the original idea being Lynn's and the original class at MIT being taught by Lynn. Yet, Carver Mead began to get all of the credit in the 1990s. At times, with societal expectations of women in STEM being even more gendered than in previous years (engineering degrees dropped 23% from 1984-1994), Lynn Conway was referred to as Carver Mead's assistant. She had a twenty year gap in receiving any recognition, despite Carver Mead continually being recognized as the sole innovator. When Lynn Conway introduced The Conway Effect, she stated the following:
"In 2009, my disappearance was complete after the Computer History Museum’s gala celebration of the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit. Sixteen men were described by the media as “the Valley’s founding fathers.” They were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for their contributions to microelectronics. Top billing went to Gordon Moore and Carver Mead. I was not invited to the event, and didn’t even know it was happening."
After this, Lynn Conway spoke up and finally started receiving recognition again, and was added into the Computer History Museum in 2014 (twelve years after Carver Mead).
Since Lynn Conway passed away two weeks ago, I've been processing her life, her legacy, and her passing. I've spent the last twenty-five years of my career working in technology, so her passing really hit close to home. Being a transgender woman, I can't imagine a better role model to show what is possible for me professionally. But there's another thing that really spoke to me. When Lynn Conway made all of these major leaps forward, she was afraid of discovery. At IBM, she invented DIS while dealing with the ramifications of living an incongruent life while simultaneously being afraid of discovery. It's amazing that she was able to do that.
In my own life, I transitioned at 50. I have these periods of guilt for not being out sooner. The guilt has been really strong, because I wasn't living my life the way I was supposed to be and I wasn't out and normalizing being trans. When I have these periods, I go through this twisted game in my head and I always come to the same conclusion. Sure, if I had done true self-examination earlier, it's conceivable that I could have come out two or even three years earlier. But it wasn't possible for me to have been able to come out any earlier than that and still have the career that I have. Yet, that guilt for not coming out earlier was still there because other people were out well before I was. They were pushing for transgender rights that I’ve inherited (and yes, we still have a long way to go).
This leads me to the period of Lynn Conway's life that often gets glossed over. She was a brilliant student at MIT in the 1950s. In addition to her class studies, she did her own research and was trying to transition then. She found a way to procure multiple years' worth of estrogen and started administrating it on herself. This certainly had a feminizing effect on her. But she realized that unless she was able to stop testosterone production, estrogen alone was not enough. So she started to investigate what would be called in modern medicine an orchiectomy (removing the testicles). As she was doing everything covertly, she first investigated if she would be able to perform this procedure on herself. I cannot imagine seriously considering if I could perform that type of procedure on myself, which shows the depths that Lynn Conway needed to bring equilibrium between her gender identity and gender expression. Realizing that there were great risks to attempting this herself led her to a doctor at Boston University to investigate. What that doctor told her shocked her to her core:
"Those operations don't make you into a woman - they only turn you into a freak! You can never become a woman! You've got to stop this sexual experimentation on yourself, or you will be institutionalized!"
The medical establishment told Lynn Conway, among the greatest minds of the twentieth century, that she would be committed to a mental institution if she continued down this path. I'll let Lynn Conway tell what this did to her, in her own words from the early 2000s:
"Without even realizing what the heck was happening, I had now been suddenly confronted with the rage, hostility and cruelty that rained down on those who were "worse than gay", i.e., people who wanted to change their sex. This was a disastrous and incredibly discouraging turn of events for me. Since I was young, I was still in awe of medical authority figures, so it never occurred to me that this senior physician was ill-informed and incredibly prejudiced, and was misrepresenting medical facts to me. After this horrible episode my confidence really began to erode. In the face of overwhelming rejection by the medical authorities, I began to lose my dreams. My years of hopeful, rather innocent "scientific" gender exploration now seemed over, and were replaced with a sense of impending doom. I stumbled on in my transition attempt, but began to sense that I'd never find a true place in society. I especially worried that I might never ever find anyone who would love me and mate with me. I became uneasy about going to classes and lost my passion for my studies, contemplating a future life without love…The session with the doctor at Boston University had torn away all my feelings of innocent exploration. I began feeling more and more like a horribly deformed freak, with no way out. I seemed to have become some kind of sexual outlaw, out of control, living on borrowed time with no future."
This, my friends, is a top issue that still plagues the transgender community today. Since coming out last year, the depths of vileness that have been hurled at me have been disgusting and it is sometimes a daily battle to affirm myself and not let those vile comments stick. A small sampling of comments directed at me: 1) Telling me that I am mentally ill.
2) Telling me that I'm sinning against God.
3) Posting a laughing response on Instagram 8 minutes after I came out as trans.
4) Calling me a slur.
5) People intentionally misgendering me.
The list goes on and on. The evidence is extremely clear that trans folks are overwhelmingly happier when they can live their life in a way that is congruent with their gender identity. It's also clear that when trans folks are not accepted, it's a huge drain on their mental health. You can see in Lynn’s quote how she lost her confidence and could not imagine a future where she existed. One of the greatest minds of the twentieth century lost her confidence and could not imagine a future with her in it because of blatant transphobia. Unfortunately this is still so common today, with 2 in 5 trans folks having attempted suicide at some point in their life and 4 in 5 trans folks having reached suicidal ideation at some point in their life. Trans folks, facing vile societal discrimination, are at risk of seeing a future where they don’t exist.
So much of why I refused to truly examine myself was because I was afraid of what I was going to conclude. I could not examine if I was trans if transitioning would mean that I would be ridiculed, lose family, friends, or especially my job. I remember when I was in management at a previous employer and we had a number of technology contracts. One of our customers had a contracting officer that was a transgender woman. Laws back then required that trans adults had to socially transition for a specified period of time before medical interventions became available. By all accounts, she did her job very well. Yet, was what I remembered that she was proficient at her job? Of course not. What stuck with me was the mad shit that was spoken about her in our company's walls. She was spoken about as if she was sub human. The transphobia was rampant. She was called "a man in a dress". She was referred to as "it". It was disgusting. It also sent a clear message that I would not be safe being out there, and it kept gnawing at me for years, whispering in my ear that it was not worth investigating if I was truly trans because it would be virtually impossible to transition and work in corporate America. Could you imagine, well over a decade before the 2020 Bostock Supreme Court decision that made it illegal for a US company to fire someone for their sexual orientation or gender identity, choosing to come out as transgender at a company where they called a transgender woman "it". It’s not hyperbole to say that it would have imploded my career.
It would be absurd to not give Lynn Conway credit not only for her innovations, but that these innovations were much harder because she was afraid of being discovered, both before and after transition. It was even more challenging for her to create DIS while both being afraid of being discovered and living incongruently with her gender identity. Yet, somehow, I wasn't giving myself credit for how far I've come. Did the patriarchal systems in place allow me to move ahead in my career? Only if I contorted myself to fit societal standards while being terrified of discovery. How much more could I have contributed if I wasn't constantly burning energy on putting on a front so that I was not discovered? While I didn't truly do a self-examination of who I was for so long, I was even afraid to do this self-examination. What would be the point of examining myself, concluding I was trans, and then not being able to change anything about my life because it would be impossible to hold a job in my field. So it's just as absurd that I hadn't been giving myself credit for getting to where I am as it would be for not recognizing Lynn Conway's breakthroughs as a trans woman. I had been thinking of my own transition in terms of a level of privilege in the before times (and there was certainly privilege in being white, born in the country I work in, and in other ways), but it is never a privilege to live in fear and be erased. Never.
Recently, I've had a number of situations that have blown me away. I had a friend who started a non-profit tell me that they are so happy to work with me because I show them what is possible, as one of a small number of people who have made it. Trans and nonbinary folks have the deck so stacked against them that they looked at my life and thought I was a light to lead them forward. Another example is after coming out, I had a work colleague tell me that when they saw me come out, it inspired them to know that it was a place where they belonged. At the nonprofit that I lead, I've had multiple parents tell me how inspiring it is to see my journey. Even with this feedback, I still was having trouble seeing my potential influence. It was when I really started to dig into Lynn Conway's life and when I started reading her first person account that it finally started to click in. I saw many commonalities between our lives, especially in childhood. I read Lynn's account of how she had participated in her own erasure because she had to for safety reasons and because she was afraid while she lived in stealth mode. That's when i realized that this was what I had been doing. I was actively erasing myself, still downplaying where I am because I was concerned with safety. I was downplaying my accomplishments based on how the world saw me instead of realizing how amazing it is that I was able to accomplish these things in stealth mode and living with incongruent gender identities and expressions.
So in the spirit of coming forward and owning how I got here, let me tell you a little more about myself.
I'm Veronica and I publicly transitioned at age 50.
I grew up with a speech impediment and still had remnants of it in my early '20's. Despite this, I went into radio for my initial career. I produced radio for a national network for years.
I then left radio and I've worked in technology for a quarter century.
I've spent fifteen years in leadership, of which a majority has been at Fortune 500 companies.
I've been the leader of a technology practice at one of these companies, responsible for over 25 million dollars in annual revenue.
I've been on a partner advisory council for one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Outside of work, I've been married for over a quarter of a century to my wife. Our marriage is on solid ground through my transition. We have two kids.
I lead a nonprofit arts organization that's focused on children and youth. We serve hundreds of kids, teens, and their families each year.
There just aren't a lot of transgender women who have spent a decade of leadership at Fortune 500 companies. That I'm doing that while I'm also leading a nonprofit that makes the lives of kids and families better makes me realize that there are very few trans folks who have done all of this. I'm grateful that I've been able to see and realize my impact.
Thanks for showing me the way Lynn.
Thank you for sharing Lynn Conway's story, and your own Veronica. In the face of such vitriol and hate, I'm literally in awe of your bravery, and the immense contributions you highlight. ❤️💙💜
Thanks Troy. I appreciate the kind words.