Lynn Conway was a transgender woman, computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist. She is known to have developed the technology used in modern day computer processors that balances programs’ processor usage to be able to simultaneously run many programs and processes at once without overloading the systems in the 1960s when she was working for IBM. This technology was groundbreaking and is still a building block for all personal computers and smartphones today.

Whilst working for IBM in the early 1960s, she announced to her employer, IBM, her intentions to transition her gender and was as a result fired. She did not receive an official apology from IBM until 52 years later in 2020. She, later in life, went on to be a transgender rights activist and especially opposed the pathologizing of transgender people by the psychiatry/psychology field which at the time of her social transition was at an all time high.

In her last interview she stated, “We are highly empowered – in ways that people may not understand – because of the joyfulness we feel in having been able to do what we do in spite of the difficulties, and find a place in society where we actually have joy in just living.”