Lynn Conway

Lynn Conway

Happy (belated) seventy-seventh birthday to Dr. Lynn Conway, now emerita at UMich, who was dealt a really shitty hand in life and overcame it to revolutionize the field of electrical engineering, literally write the book on VLSI design (along with Dr. Carver Mead, of CIT), and, in the past fifteen years, become a outspoken trans-rights activist. She also rides motocross.

![Photograph of Dr. Lynn Conway](http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/LynnPhotos/Lynn2006.jpg" caption=""Playing is Adventuring is Exploring is Innovating is Designing is Engineering is Architecting is Art."
~Lynn Conway")

When I'm calling out heroes in STEM, I usually say something about the sort of challenges they had to overcome to achieve what they did, but Dr. Conway's story takes the cake. She was born physically male, which, as it turns out, is a really, really shitty thing to happen to you if you're a girl born in 1938. She's written a memoir on her life, which traverses the painfully personal, the fascinatingly technical, and everything in between, in the arc from her early struggles with gender identity; to her career at IBM (cut short when they fired her for transitioning male-to-female); to her subsequent second career-from-scratch at, well, everywhere; to her coming-out and subsequent trans activism. I don't have the words to recommend it highly enough. It's honest, raw, and inspiring -- oh, just read it.

Conway's accomplishments include:


Ozy, of their blog Thing of Things, gets credit for bringing Conway to my attention, re: #RealLiveTransAdults, in their post of thoughts on Leelah Alcorn.