Lynn Conway Is Dead – Let The Hagiography Begin
Already, trans activists are lionizing her, spreading misinformation about her life.
I first heard of Lynn Conway from Dr. Joy Shaffer’s father in 1982. He was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He had met Conway at a conference and instantly read her as transsexual. Conway claimed that she was successfully stealth until 1999 when she retired and then went public. Nothing could be further from the truth. She was well known in Silicon Valley, both for co-authoring a seminal textbook on VLSI semiconductor chip design and well… for being a transwoman.
In the late 1990s, I was researching and teaching a class on TransHistory at the Harvey Milk Institute in San Francisco. At the time, knowledge of our history was almost non-existent. It seemed like every other week some newly transitioned individual would make the claim that they were the “first transsexual to XXX” when I knew for a fact that they were not even close to being such. As well as teaching the class, I had placed some of my class notes and power point slides online to supplement and expand the class reach. Conway contacted me because of that website. She wanted me to know about and include her in that history as she was then intending to go public. She wanted me to include her on my website as a “successful transsexual woman”. I politely declined.
The simple fact was that she had done nothing that impacted our history in any notable way other than to have co-authored a textbook. (Just for reference, so have I.) But still, Conway and I became acquaintances, as she visited me on multiple occasions over the next few years. She treated me to lunch on one occasion when I gave her a tour of my workplace. (One of my co-workers fawned over her as he had learned chip design from her textbook, a copy of which was in a place of honor in his office. He was amazed that I knew her personally.) On another occasion, my husband Jeff and I treated her to dinner at a local restaurant.
On this occasion, while eating dinner, she insisted upon describing in graphic detail her recent participation in a research study on post-op transsexual masturbation, while instrumented in a clinical setting, and strongly insisted that I should also enroll and participate. She utterly failed to heed my pointed hints that I was uncomfortable with this discussion, especially in a public restaurant, in the company of my husband!
Also, at that same dinner, she repeatedly discussed her recent Facial Feminization Surgery and fished for compliments, largely from Jeff. I wanted to scream, “Get your own husband!”. (She later did.) From then on whenever her name came up, Jeff would opine that she was the most vain woman he had ever met.
On yet another occasion, while visiting at my house, sitting in my parlor, we had a frank discussion on the science of transsexuality in which I fully explicated the Two Type Taxonomy. (Recall that it had been originally explained to me, over dinner at my house, by none other than Dr. Anne Lawrence and Dr. Joy Shaffer some years prior.) Lynn totally agreed that this fully explained much that she had seen in the community. But she then made the most astounding nonsensical claim that she was an “early transitioner” because she had transitioned at age 28. “No Lynn, that’s LATE.” (There was also that little detail about having married as a straight man and sired two children. She was clearly NOT HSTS!)
Conway fans will claim that she attempted to transition at age 19 while a student at MIT. This is an utter falsehood. She merely occasionally cross-dressed in private, taking photos of herself doing so. She talked with a classmate about wanting to transition who mistakenly opined that if she did, she would likely be locked up in an insane asylum. That was the full extent of her teenaged attempt at transition. (It should be understood that many HSTS were transitioned full time during those very same years, and more than one AGP had transitioned before that point, e.g. Christine Jorgensen in 1952).
Conway had not given up on her obsession with being a “successful transsexual woman” but gave up on trying to convince me to be her publicist, instead becoming her own by creating a website in which she had a starring role, along with other “successful transsexual women”. She wanted to include me, but as I was then raising funds for a highly visible high tech start-up with international partners, I strenuously declined permission to include me. That didn’t stop her from proudly blogging about visiting me and claiming that she was advising me, which I did allow.
Now, let’s go forward in time to 2003. Professor Michael Bailey publishes a book that discusses the Two Type Taxonomy. Conway calls me out of the blue complaining about the book and wants me to join her in a crusade against him and the book. I could not understand why she thought that I, of all people, would wish to do that, given our discussion about that very topic several years earlier. She knew that I was already familiar with the science and that I agreed that it was correct. Far from wishing to participate in protesting the book, I would more likely support it. I politely, but firmly declined to participate in her protest effort.
I’m glad I did. But am ashamed that I did not follow up and support Dr. Bailey. I sat on the sidelines, not paying attention to it, focusing instead on my start-up company. I didn’t know at the time the shameful things that she did in the name of her protest.
Fast forward to 2008 when I read Alice Dreger’s expose on Conway’s shameful behavior, along with several others… I highly recommend reading it, and her later book that also touched on the subject and its aftermath. Because of that expose, I wrote an essay of my own using the pen name “cloudy”. Conway and especially Andrea James spent a year trying to diss this author, alternating between trying to figure out who wrote it and claiming it was a hoax. They figured it out, then Conway gave James my contact info so that she could call me and threaten me. Her response to my not being cowed by her was to produce a scurrilous webpage on her site.
To me, far from being a hero of our community, Lynn Conway disgraced herself, and us by association.
Further Reading
What The Next Wave of Transsexual Activists Need To Know
Further External Reading:
Bailey, J. Michael – Triea, Kiira. “What Many Transgender Activists Don’t Want You to Know: and why you should know it anyway” – Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Volume 50, Number 4, Autumn 2007, pp. 521-534 DOI: 10.1353/pbm.2007.0041
Alice D. Dreger, “The Controversy Surrounding The Man Who Would Be Queen: A Case History of the Politics of Science, Identity, and Sex in the Internet Age” – Archives of Sexual Behavior, June 2008, Volume 37, pp 366-421 DOI: 10.1007/s10508-007-9301-1
On the Science of Changing Sex 
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