Lynn Conway

Lynn Conway (born 1938) is an American computer scientist, inventor, and transsexual activist.

Conway is notable for several technical achievements, including the Mead & Conway revolution in VLSI design, which incubated an emerging electronic design automation industry. She 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 most modern computer processors to improve performance.

Career

After getting a degree at Columbia, Conway worked for IBM until 1968.

She joined Xerox PARC in 1973, where she led the "LSI Systems" group under Bert Sutherland. 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.

Gender transition

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 which 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.

Transgender activism and controversy

Since outing herself, Conway has been a transgender rights activist. She has provided direct and indirect assistance to numerous other transsexual women going through transition and maintains a website listing many post-transition transsexual people who she considers successful. Her website also provides current news related to transgender issues and information on sex reassignment surgery for transsexual women, facial feminization surgery, and transgender/transsexual issues in general.

Conway participated in a controversial campaign against J. Michael Bailey and his controversial book The Man Who Would Be Queen. Moreover, she has broadly criticized Ray Blanchard's taxonomy of male-to-female transsexualism and all supporters of Blanchard's model. A history of the controversy was published by Alice Dreger, an historian and intersex activist, in which Dreger concluded that Conway coordinated a smear campaign against Bailey; that history, along with commentaries both agreeing and disagreeing with that allegation, appears in a special issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

External links

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