Lynn Conway

Lynn Conway (born January 2, 1938) in White Plains, New York, is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer, inventor, transwoman, and activist for the transgender community.

Conway is notable for a number of pioneering 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 generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance.

Early life and education
Conway grew up in White Plains, New York. Although shy and experiencing gender dysphoria as a child, Conway became fascinated and engaged by astronomy (building a 6-inch (150 mm) reflector telescope one summer) and did well in math and science in high school. Conway entered MIT in 1955, earning high grades but ultimately leaving in despair after an attempted gender transition in 1957-8 failed due to the medical climate at the time. After working as an electronics technician for several years, Conway resumed education at Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Science, earning B.S. and M.S.E.E. degrees in 1962 and 1963.

Early research at IBM
Conway was recruited by IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York in 1964, and was soon selected to join the computer architecture team designing an advanced supercomputer, working alongside John Cocke, Herbert Schorr, Ed Sussenguth, Fran Allen and other IBM researchers on the Advanced Computing Systems (ACS) project, inventing multiple-issue out-of-order dynamic instruction scheduling while working there. The Computer History Museum has stated that "the ACS machines appears to have been the first superscalar design, a computer architectural paradigm widely exploited in modern high-performance microprocessors."

Gender transition
After learning of the pioneering research of Dr. Harry Benjamin in transgender treatment and realizing that a full gender transition was now possible, Conway sought his help and became his patient. After suffering from severe depression from gender dysphoria, Conway contacted Dr. Benjamin, who agreed to providing counseling and prescribe hormones. Under Dr. Benjamin's care, Conway began preparing for transition.

While struggling with life in a male role, Conway had been married to a woman and had two children. Under the legal constraints then in place, after transitioning she was denied access to their children.

Although hoping to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after revealing intentions to transition to a female gender role.

Career as computer scientist
Upon completing her transition in 1968, Conway took a new name and identity, and restarted her career in "stealth-mode" as a contract programmer at Computer Applications, Inc. She went on to work at Memorex during 1969–1972 as a digital system designer and computer architect.

Transgender activism
When nearing retirement, Conway learned that the story of her early work at IBM might soon be revealed through the investigations of Mark Smotherman that were being prepared for a 2001 publication. She began quietly coming out in 1999 to friends and colleagues about her past gender transition,  using her personal website to tell the story in her own words. Her story was then more widely reported in 2000 in profiles in Scientific American and the Los Angeles Times.

After going public with her story, she began work in transgender activism, intending to "illuminate and normalize the issues of gender identity and the processes of gender transition." She has worked to protect and expand the rights of transgendered people. She has provided direct and indirect assistance to numerous other transsexual women going through transition and maintains a well-known website providing emotional and medical resources and advice. Parts have been translated into most of the world's major languages. She maintains a listing of many successful post-transition transsexual people, to, in her words "provide role models for individuals who are facing gender transition." Her website also provides current news related to transgender issues and information on sex reassignment surgery for transsexual women, facial feminization surgery, academic inquiries into the prevalence of transsexualism and transgender/transsexual issues in general.

Conway has been a prominent critic of the Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence theory of male-to-female transsexualism that all transsexual women are motivated either by feminine homosexuality or autogynephilia. She was also a key person in the campaign against J. Michael Bailey's controversial book The Man Who Would Be Queen. Conway and others filed a complaint with Northwestern University accusing Bailey of practicing clinical psychology without a license, and witnessed a complaint by a trans woman accusing Bailey of having sex with a research subject. Benedict Carey wrote an article in which he observed that "the controversy had a life of its own on the Internet." Northwestern University professor Alice Dreger published an article about the controversy, in which she concluded that the campaign against Bailey was an attempt to ruin Bailey's reputation and career by making various false accusations against him. Conway called Dreger's article "one-sided" and complained that its publication, and Carey's article, reflected pro-Bailey bias by the Archives of Sexual Behavior and The New York Times.

Conway was a cast member in the first all-transgender performance of The Vagina Monologues, in Los Angeles in 2004, and appeared in a LOGO-Channel documentary film about that event entitled Beautiful Daughters. She has also strongly advocated for equal opportunities and employment protections for transgender people in high-technology industry, and for elimination of the pathologization of transgender people by the psychiatric community.

In 2009, Conway was named one of the "Stonewall 40 trans heroes" on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots by the International Court System, one of the oldest and largest predominantly gay organizations in the world, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Home life
In 1987, Conway met her husband Charlie, a professional engineer who shares her interest in the outdoors, including canoeing and motocross. They soon started living together, and bought a house with 24 acres (97,000 m2) of meadow, marsh, and woodland in rural Michigan in 1994. In 2002, they were married.

Awards and honors
Conway has received a number of awards and distinctions:


 * Electronics (magazine) 1981 Award for Achievement
 * Pender Award of the Moore School, University of Pennsylvania, 1984
 * IEEE EAB Major Educational Innovation Award, 1984
 * Fellow of the IEEE, 1985, "for contributions to VLSI technology"
 * The Wetherill Medal of the Franklin Institute, 1985
 * Secretary of Defense Meritorious Civilian Service Award, May 1985
 * Member of the National Academy of Engineering, 1989
 * National Achievement Award, Society of Women Engineers, 1990
 * Presidential Appointment to the United States Air Force Academy Board of Visitors, 1996
 * Honorary Doctorate, Trinity College, 1998
 * Electronic Design (magazine) Hall of Fame, 2002
 * Engineer of the Year, National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientific and Technical Professionals, 2005
 * Named one of the "Stonewall 40 trans heroes" by the ICS and NGLTF, 2009.
 * Computer Pioneer Award, IEEE Computer Society, 2009