Lynn Conway

Lynn Conway (born 1938) is an American computer scientist, inventor, and controversial transsexual activist. She is notable for several technical achievements, including the world-wide Mead & Conway VLSI design revolution, which she started with Carver Mead - a world-wide incubator of the emerging EDA industry. Conway 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 almost all modern processors to improve performance.

Career

Conway worked for IBM until 1968. She joined Xerox PARC in 1973, where she worked on VLSI design. With Carver Mead she co-authored Introduction to VLSI Systems, a groundbreaking work that would soon become a standard textbook in chip design.

In the early 1980s Conway was a key architect of the Defense Department's Strategic Computing Initiative at DARPA, a research program studying high-performance computing, autonomous systems technology, and intelligent weapons technology. She became a professor at the University of Michigan in 1985, where she is now professor emerita, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1989 for her accomplishments in VLSI design.

Transsexual activism

After learning of the pioneering research of Dr. Harry Benjamin in transgender treatment, Conway realized that she was a transsexual woman and that transition to a female gender role was possible. After suffering from severe depression over her situation, Conway contacted Dr. Benjamin, who agreed to counsel her and prescribe hormones. Conway had made an earlier transition attempt in the late 1950s that failed due to the medical climate at the time. Under Dr. Benjamin's care, she began preparing for a successful transition.

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.

While living as a man, Conway had been married to a woman and had two children. After losing her IBM job and access to her children, she restarted her career from the ground up as a female, working as a contract programmer.

After retiring from her professorship in December 1998, she decided to out herself as a transsexual woman again in 1999 after she realised that the story of her IBM work might soon come out. Since then, she has been a prominent spokesperson for rights of transsexual people. Some scholars have likened James to "the Al Sharpton rather than the M.L. King sort" of activist". A comprehensive, documented history of the controversy surrounding the book The Man Who Would Be Queen concluded that Conway coordinated the fabrication and dissemination of false allegations against the book's author. When The New York Times covered the story, Conway refused to provide comment.

References

• Hiltzik, Michael A. (2000-11-19.) "Through the Gender Labyrinth." (Link to free abstract, full text for a fee). Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times Magazine, page 1. (Free reprint from Lynn Conway's personal website. Retrieved on 2007-09-19.)

External links

• Lynn Conway's website. Primarily written in English, but many articles are provided in other languages as well.