As a trans kid on the "early" (early-2000s) Internet, Lynn Conway and Wendy Carlos were the first trans people I was aware of who were not movie jokes or villains. I owe a lot to the handful of trans folks who were among the first people to have a web presence at all.
No kidding. It's a shame so many of that "old guard" are married to some...pretty outdated ideas of what being trans is, but they still had to fight a lot of shit we don't.
Nobody's perfect. if they hadn't had those fights then you'd be having more of them. Besides, your ideas are most likely going to be looked at as pretty outdated by the generations that follow, that's pretty much the expected thing.
"Inspired by her interdisciplinary studies in history, anthropology, and sociology at Columbia, Conway sought, as an engineer, not only to ride a wave of innovation in computing but to spark maximal diffusion of her open-ended method for better VLSI chips by empowering more researchers to advance the field."
Lynn Conway gave the most amazing talk I'd seen up to that point in my life, in the 1980's at Columbia. (Whitfield Diffie would be the other.) She opened with graphs of how birds in England had learned to poke the foil on milk deliveries, and drink the cream. She generalized this to describing how she deliberately used her training in anthropology to accelerate the spread of her new approach to VSLI chip design.
I had no idea she was trans, though the only way it could matter would be as another data point for how being at odds with the conventional world so often boosts creative thinking. And I've encouraged many students since, "To be a revolutionary, first embrace that you want to be a revolutionary."
Sometimes folks look at me askance when I talk about my pride in 'my people' -- I get eyeball rolls now and then. But stories like these remind me that I'm from a psychosocial lineage that is strength and brilliance incarnate.
Not just one but TWO impressive careers. She invented superscalar CPUs in her first career, was brutally fired by IBM for being trans, then rebooted her life in stealth from scratch, and not only invented but wrote the book on and taught VLSI design to a whole generation of designers, including industry giants like Guy L Steele and James H Clark (among many others).
She serves as incontrovertible proof of how utterly vile and wrong and morally and intellectually bankrupt the conservative transphobic bigots who abuse the technology Lynn invented to spread their hatred and mendacious political attacks are, who don't deserve to use any of the technology she created and shared for their hate mongering and bullying to destroy other people's lives that are none of their business.
IBM made a HUGE mistake firing her, but 52 years later finally sincerely turned the ship around, reformed, and apologized for their mistake and honored her.
How much longer will it take the rest of the transphobic assholes in the world, especially the Republican party and MAGA Cult who are divisively and diabolically trying to grab power by running this election on the abuse of trans and LGBTQA+ children and adults, even to the point of beclowning themselves by waging a pathetic losing Jihad against Mickey Mouse, to realize how fucking EVIL and WRONG they are, and finally shut the fuck up with the hate speech and whining about how Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity, and simply treating other human beings with respect, is so inconvenient for their chosen lifestyles of bible thumping, bigotry, insurrection, and hatred, to finally apologize for being such bullying sociopathic jackasses, and beg their make-believe gods and the rest of actual humanity for forgiveness.
IBM Issues an Apology for Firing a Transgender Woman
52 Years Later, IBM Apologizes for Firing Transgender Woman
Lynn Conway was one of the company’s most promising young computer engineers but after confiding to supervisors that she was transgender, they fired her.
Some people, who do not normally pay attention to this kind of issue, are shocked when they learn the extent of the knuckle-draggers' abuse. It is worthwhile noting that in 2023, in the US alone, no less than 566 anti-trans bills have been proposed in 49 states.
This goes far beyond hate speech, actively criminalizing the existence of trans people.
Lynn Conway, co-author along with Carver Mead of "the textbook" on VLSI design, "Introduction to VLSI Systems", created and taught this historic VLSI Design Course in 1978, which was the first time students designed and fabricated their own integrated circuits:
>"Importantly, these weren’t just any designs, for many pushed the envelope of system architecture. Jim Clark, for instance, prototyped the Geometry Engine and went on to launch Silicon Graphics Incorporated based on that work (see Fig. 16). Guy Steele, Gerry Sussman, Jack Holloway and Alan Bell created the follow-on ‘Scheme’ (a dialect of LISP) microprocessor, another stunning design."
A shout-out and thank-you to the transphobes who downvoted this without replying and explaining why they hate trans people so much, proving my point that they know they're wrong and don't have a leg to stand on to justify their bigotry, because their arguments and justifications for their hatred won't withstand scrutiny. If I've convinced them to finally shut the fuck up and instead just silently downvote in shame without commenting, then at least that's a step in the right direction.
I didn't downvote, but your original comment is (to me at least) an unreadable, massive wall of links and quotes, that's hard to scan visually for a hint of its content, taking up unusually many screen-fuls on my mobile client.
This is only conjecture, but maybe some people who downvoted wanted to signal that they would have preferred a contribution that is more inviting and accessible to the reader.
Don is HN's unofficial historian of the computing industry, much of which he has personally witnessed or been a part of. His comments may be long but offer a wealth of background on the subjects where he can be bothered to comment on, if you think this is too long I wonder how you look at books and what you would improve to make the comment more readable, for me it is perfectly fine.
Actually it's because your style of commenting is only a small step away from that of the TempleOS guy. Maybe calm down a bit, be a bit more concise instead of subjecting us to walls of yawn and then going off on one ranting about it when other users signal their disinterest. I mean come on man, no-one wants to read all this.
It kept me alive too. Lynn's website helped me see that I was not a freak and that I could grow into someone who is happy and successful. I'm now quite the trailblazer in my own field too.
Lynn's tireless efforts to carve a path forward for inclusion and acceptance, despite the thorny thickets of bigotry and transphobia, allow us to walk in her footsteps.
"If you want to change the future, start living as if you're already there" – Lynn Conway
> At the same time, Lynn was dismayed that transsexual women are still treated so inhumanely by parents, relatives, employers, the legal system and society at large. The total rejection of teenage transgender and transsexual girls-to-be by their families is especially tragic, since it often happens just as they first cry out for help, and can doom them to years of marginalized existence.
In addition to intolerant families and workplaces, transgender people still face a Kafkaesque battle to change their legal names to one which doesn't cause dysphoria on every interaction with government, financial, and healthcare institutions (in the US, it requires deadname-filled forms with conflicting instructions to obtain a court order and change your birth certificate, passport, social security database, and ID/license, followed by bringing these documents to banking, medical, and insurance providers), difficulties accessing medical care (in some states, even bigots creating laws specifically to deny them treatment), some doctors following outdated or inaccurate practices resulting in ineffective treatment or dangerous side effects (blood clots or prolactinoma), and increased unemployment rates (for one reason or another). I hope things get better, for the sake of my own survival and future.
Do you have information on what you're working on? It might help me or my friends (though I don't know if it would also help with trauma and running into hurtful roadblocks and struggling just trying to function at a basic adult level).
It's a little JS tool that collates and autofills (to the extent possible) all the documents you need. It only works for Michigan, my home state, but I'm developing a system to hopefully ease the other 49.
Are you filling out PDF forms using Chromium or Edge's PDF viewer? How are you programatically filling and saving/printing documents? I struggled quite hard with inter-PDF-viewer incompatibilities and rendering errors on (legacy?) XFA forms, not being able to save PDFs with Adobe unless I paid for Acrobat Pro, etc.
I read her whole retrospective last summer and it was the story that made me feel like I not only had a place as a trans woman in science, but could be ambitious as well!
Retrospective: https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/RetrospectiveT.html
It also so charming to see other trans people here on hacker news celebrating Lynn Conway. I didn't know there were so many of us here!
Dreger is not exactly a neutral party in this. You can’t take her words as some sort of neutral account of what happened. If you don’t want trans people and specifically trans women to exist it’s very easy to use words like ‘trying to ruin’ to describe well-deserved criticism and rebuttal. That too, is a fundamental part of the scientific method.
Much of the dreg published back then by Bailey, Blanchard, Raymond and others has long since been discredited by the scientific community and before you say anything: no, not because of ‘wokeism gone mad’.
One pillar of their research back then (and in part - to this day) was insisting trans women are men who suffer from a condition called autogynephilia (a fetish for seeing oneself as an attractive woman - the theory Dreger is referring to). And yes, a considerable amount of trans women met the standards he set for this condition. But it turns out, the percentage is even higher among cis (non-trans) women. 93% of them qualify. I guess the remaining 7% are the real women.
If you are sincerely interested I recommend reading the works of Julia Serano. This piece about the book you mentioned is a great place to start: http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2015/04/alice-dreger-and-mak...
If you’re just looking for ammunition to throw at trans people because you don’t like them existing, as very much seems to be the case with Alice Dreger, I can only hope you’ll find a more meaningful and positive way to spend your time.
This is actual research that can be replicated by anyone,
if you like. Moser’s questions were not the ones asked in the original studies and therefore do not refute anything in them.
Dating a transfemme, lovely lovely person., she will appreciate if I send this her way to show strength and pioneer paths of previous generations, and that there are no limits to what she can aspire to be!
45 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 67.7 ms ] threadLynn Conway's Retrospective (2003) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24312700 - Aug 2020 (8 comments)
"Inspired by her interdisciplinary studies in history, anthropology, and sociology at Columbia, Conway sought, as an engineer, not only to ride a wave of innovation in computing but to spark maximal diffusion of her open-ended method for better VLSI chips by empowering more researchers to advance the field."
Lynn Conway gave the most amazing talk I'd seen up to that point in my life, in the 1980's at Columbia. (Whitfield Diffie would be the other.) She opened with graphs of how birds in England had learned to poke the foil on milk deliveries, and drink the cream. She generalized this to describing how she deliberately used her training in anthropology to accelerate the spread of her new approach to VSLI chip design.
I had no idea she was trans, though the only way it could matter would be as another data point for how being at odds with the conventional world so often boosts creative thinking. And I've encouraged many students since, "To be a revolutionary, first embrace that you want to be a revolutionary."
Power to us all. <3
She serves as incontrovertible proof of how utterly vile and wrong and morally and intellectually bankrupt the conservative transphobic bigots who abuse the technology Lynn invented to spread their hatred and mendacious political attacks are, who don't deserve to use any of the technology she created and shared for their hate mongering and bullying to destroy other people's lives that are none of their business.
IBM made a HUGE mistake firing her, but 52 years later finally sincerely turned the ship around, reformed, and apologized for their mistake and honored her.
How much longer will it take the rest of the transphobic assholes in the world, especially the Republican party and MAGA Cult who are divisively and diabolically trying to grab power by running this election on the abuse of trans and LGBTQA+ children and adults, even to the point of beclowning themselves by waging a pathetic losing Jihad against Mickey Mouse, to realize how fucking EVIL and WRONG they are, and finally shut the fuck up with the hate speech and whining about how Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity, and simply treating other human beings with respect, is so inconvenient for their chosen lifestyles of bible thumping, bigotry, insurrection, and hatred, to finally apologize for being such bullying sociopathic jackasses, and beg their make-believe gods and the rest of actual humanity for forgiveness.
IBM Issues an Apology for Firing a Transgender Woman
https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/events/ibm-a...
IBM Apologizes For Firing Computer Pioneer For Being Transgender...52 Years Later
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremyalicandri/2020/11/18/ibm-...
This HR Executive of the Year is Transforming IBM
https://hrexecutive.com/this-hr-executive-of-the-year-is-tra...
52 Years Later, IBM Apologizes for Firing Transgender Woman
Lynn Conway was one of the company’s most promising young computer engineers but after confiding to supervisors that she was transgender, they fired her.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/21/business/lynn-conway-ibm-...
Column: IBM apologizes for firing a transgender pioneer, 52 years late
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-11-23/ibm-apolog...
IBM fired U-M professor Lynn Conway for coming out as trans in 1968. 52 years later, the company apologized
https://michigan.it.umich.edu/news/2020/12/02/ibm-fired-u-m-...
IBM fired U-M professor Lynn Conway for coming out as trans in 1968. 52 years later, the company apologized...
This goes far beyond hate speech, actively criminalizing the existence of trans people.
Lynn Conway, co-author along with Carver Mead of "the textbook" on VLSI design, "Introduction to VLSI Systems", created and taught this historic VLSI Design Course in 1978, which was the first time students designed and fabricated their own integrated circuits:
>"Importantly, these weren’t just any designs, for many pushed the envelope of system architecture. Jim Clark, for instance, prototyped the Geometry Engine and went on to launch Silicon Graphics Incorporated based on that work (see Fig. 16). Guy Steele, Gerry Sussman, Jack Holloway and Alan Bell created the follow-on ‘Scheme’ (a dialect of LISP) microprocessor, another stunning design."
THE M.I.T. 1978 VLSI SYSTEM DESIGN COURSE:
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/MIT78.htm...
A Guidebook for the Instructor of VLSI System Design:
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/InstGuide/InstG...
That book and course catalyzed the "Mead–Conway VLSI chip design revolution":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead%E2%80%93Conway_VLSI_chip_...
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead
Lynn Conway's "Reminiscences of the VLSI Revolution: How a series of failures triggered a paradigm shift in digital design":
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Memoirs/VLSI/Lynn_Co...
Also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25964865
Here's some historic Vintage VLSI Porn that I posted 6 years ago, from Lynn Conway's famous VLSI Design course at MIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8860722
DonHopkins on Jan 9, 2015 | on: Design of Lisp-Based Processors Or, LAMBDA: The Ul...
I believe this is about the Lisp Microprocessor that Guy Steele created in Lynn Conway's groundbreaking 1978 MIT VLSI System Design Course:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/MIT78.html
My friend David Levitt is crouching down in this class photo so his big 1978 hair doesn't block Guy Steele's face:
The class photo is in two parts, left and right:
This is only conjecture, but maybe some people who downvoted wanted to signal that they would have preferred a contribution that is more inviting and accessible to the reader.
Lynn's tireless efforts to carve a path forward for inclusion and acceptance, despite the thorny thickets of bigotry and transphobia, allow us to walk in her footsteps.
"If you want to change the future, start living as if you're already there" – Lynn Conway
In addition to intolerant families and workplaces, transgender people still face a Kafkaesque battle to change their legal names to one which doesn't cause dysphoria on every interaction with government, financial, and healthcare institutions (in the US, it requires deadname-filled forms with conflicting instructions to obtain a court order and change your birth certificate, passport, social security database, and ID/license, followed by bringing these documents to banking, medical, and insurance providers), difficulties accessing medical care (in some states, even bigots creating laws specifically to deny them treatment), some doctors following outdated or inaccurate practices resulting in ineffective treatment or dangerous side effects (blood clots or prolactinoma), and increased unemployment rates (for one reason or another). I hope things get better, for the sake of my own survival and future.
It also so charming to see other trans people here on hacker news celebrating Lynn Conway. I didn't know there were so many of us here!
- Q: What do you call a group of trans people
- A: The IT team
:)
Yes there are many of us
https://youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM
Much of the dreg published back then by Bailey, Blanchard, Raymond and others has long since been discredited by the scientific community and before you say anything: no, not because of ‘wokeism gone mad’.
One pillar of their research back then (and in part - to this day) was insisting trans women are men who suffer from a condition called autogynephilia (a fetish for seeing oneself as an attractive woman - the theory Dreger is referring to). And yes, a considerable amount of trans women met the standards he set for this condition. But it turns out, the percentage is even higher among cis (non-trans) women. 93% of them qualify. I guess the remaining 7% are the real women.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19591032/
If you are sincerely interested I recommend reading the works of Julia Serano. This piece about the book you mentioned is a great place to start: http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2015/04/alice-dreger-and-mak... If you’re just looking for ammunition to throw at trans people because you don’t like them existing, as very much seems to be the case with Alice Dreger, I can only hope you’ll find a more meaningful and positive way to spend your time.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-022-02359-8
(Bailey's also an associate of Steve Sailer, which is reason enough to doubt his honesty)