This is the second part of my series on famous QUILTBAG scientists. The previous part is here.
Lynn Conway is an extraordinary scientist. In the field of computer science, she’s one of the biggest names, and plenty of processes that are used in computers began life as her brainchild. Most interestingly, she was involved with one of the greatest breakthroughs in computer science history, and for thirty years nobody knew.
But her story doesn’t start with Lynn Conway. Her story starts with a boy called Robert.
Robert was born on January 10th, 1938, in White Plains, New York. Robert (now known as Lynn) would grow up to be one of the most influential scientists the world has ever seen. Although Lynn's biological sex was male, her gender was female. Her mother was a teacher, and her father was a chemical engineer.
She was shy, and seemed to prefer the quieter play of girls her age to playing with boys. When she was four, she pointed at a frilly cotton dress in a shop window and asked her mother if she could have it. Her parents, concerned that she wasn’t going to be an “average boy”, made sure she cut her hair short and limited displays of affection, worried that that was the cause. The knowledge that transgender people existed (let alone that it was a natural occurrence) wouldn’t come around for many years, so her family had no way to understand that she wasn’t male at all. After her parents divorced when Lynn was 7, they didn’t keep as much of an eye on her and her brother. Which was a shame, really; she was an extraordinary child.
Using only the various offcuts that her mother brought back from her schoolroom assignments, one summer she designed and (with her younger brother’s help) built a radio telescope, 12 foot across, in her back yard. In 1952, the radio waves that came from outer space were considered not worth observing at best and a nuisance at worst. In astrophysics nowadays the study of radio waves emitted from celestial bodies is one of the most expansive fields, and it is an indispensable tool. This fourteen-year-old built a fully working machine nobody wanted, years before they realised they needed it, because she was bored during the summer.
Gifted at science and maths at school, Lynn entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955. Away from her parents at 17, and experiencing severe dysphoria due to the increasing masculinization of her body during puberty, which conflicted with her increased feelings of “girlishness”, she began to explore what she sensed to be her true self. She derived the name “Lynn” from her middle name, and began to use it for her increasingly assertive female persona. When she found out that a group of her acquaintances were stealing narcotics from pharmacies, she conducted thorough research into hormones, and asked them to bring her some injectable oestrogen.
The hormones had the effect wanted – Lynn’s skin and features softened, her body hair thinned, she began to develop breasts. She began coming out to a few close friends, and then wearing women’s clothing in public, where her androgynously feminine looks attracted male attention.
Her gender dysphoria became increasingly hard to deal with, and eventually a friend referred her to a professor at the medical school who reportedly knew about transsexuality and the options available. If he wasn’t able to help, the friend reasoned, then at least he could provide a professional shoulder to lean on and help. The meeting started well, as Lynn talked about her confusion over feeling like her body wasn’t correct. The doctor listened, and then replied with the news that she didn’t want to hear: "Unfortunately, there isn’t anything you can do to become a woman."
Crisply he outlined the stark choices. Lynn could cease the hormone-taking and resolve to end this phase of “sexual experimentation” (as it was seen then) on her own, or the state of Massachusetts would do it for her, by institutionalizing her as a “sexual deviant” – there was little tolerance of anything outside the norm at the time.
Lynn asked about anything else she could do – a few weeks earlier, Christine Jorgensen had become the first in the world to undergo sex reassignment surgery, and Lynn had hoped the professor could help her get it.
"Those operations don’t make you into a woman," came the reply. "They just make you into a freak."
After this, Lynn flunked out of MIT and moved to live on the outskirts of San Francisco. The gay community didn’t seem to fit, though, as she felt like a woman attracted to men, not a man attracted to men.
She enrolled at Columbia University in 1961 and earned bachelors and master’s degrees in electrical engineering after only two years. She was offered a job at IBM, and was part of a team that was involved in designing the most powerful supercomputer in the world. She accidentally, after a night together, made a woman pregnant, and then married her, despite Lynn’s misgivings. They had two children together.
In 1968, despite the cost of the procedure, Lynn underwent sex reassignment surgery and was finally able to live fully as her correct gender, legally taking the name Lynn Conway.
There were plenty of problems at the time – Lynn’s wife divorced her and, fearing that the social services would intervene, blocked her from seeing her children. IBM decided to quietly remove her from the company, fearing that it would cause problems. Companies refused to employ her after she had to write down her medical history for applications.
More recently, in 1987, she met her husband Charlie, a professional engineer who shares her interest in the outdoors. They married in 2002. Now Lynn Conway is one of the most well-known computer scientists, and many of her innovations are instrumental in the devices that we use every day. She is in contact with her children still, and also is on good terms with her brother.
Conway remained in the closet until 1999, when the risk of being outed by somebody researching IBM’s breakthroughs when she worked there became too great. After going public with her story, she turned to trans* rights activism, and has worked to protect and expand the rights of transgendered people.
Going through the list of her scientific jobs and achievements would take too long, so I’m going to talk about just a couple of her more pioneering achievements. Firstly there are the Mead-Conway innovations in Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI). VLSI is the process by which integrated circuits are created by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. In the 70s, more and more transistors were being used in chips – the amount doubled each year. The technology tended to be in the hands of industry, rather than universities, and so education on VLSI fell behind. By the 1980s, when 20,000 transistors could be put onto a single chip, Lynn Conway and Carver Mead called for the separation of design and technology – so engineers that focused on design could concentrate on making the thousands of transistors work together most efficiently, and technology-based engineers could work on making transistors smaller and faster. The two wrote a textbook on the subject, and Conway travelled around America giving lectures in universities about it. Pentium chips – used in most computers today – would not exist without Mead and Conway’s research.
She also pioneered out-of-order execution, used in most high-performance microprocessors to speed up programs. The paradigm cuts down on processing time by having the processor implement functions as input data is available, rather than following the order set out in the program. This means that the processor doesn’t need to load up every piece of data again as it follows a program. Your computer will do this, every computer will do this, and it’s an incredibly useful piece of computer technology. Extraordinary indeed.
Lynn Conway has her own website, which can be found here.
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