- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
I have mixed feelings on the pronoun use, but having read some of her autobiographical writing I don’t think she would have taken much issue with it. This piece is more focused on her work in computer engineering, so I felt it was appropriate to post here.
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I have mixed feelings on the pronoun use, but having read some of her autobiographical writing I don’t think she would have taken much issue with it.
It’s fine how they’ve used it because it’s referring to the time before transition, so it’s just being accurate and also means the story makes more sense.
A lot of trans people would disagree. Just because someone was forced to conform to their biological sex for years doesn’t mean they felt that way on the inside.
Every trans person I know, without exception, prefers to refer to their pre-transition selves by their current pronouns and would take issue with the suggestion that they were still a boy/girl before becoming a girl/boy.
can confirm
One analogy to consider is when someone comes out of the closet as non-hetero.
Say you know a man called Joe Schmoe who used to live “in the closet” but eventually came out and said he was gay, he’d always been gay, and he’s ready to publicly proclaim his sexuality. You wouldn’t then look at a photo of Joe taken back before he came out and say “this is a picture of heterosexual Joe Schmoe” because he wasn’t heterosexual, he was a gay man who wasn’t yet able to live that particular truth. Past Joe was still gay, not straight, and it remains correct to refer to him as gay no matter when in his life you’re talking about. The error of his previous misidentification has been corrected, and his labels thoroughly updated to reflect that.
Similarly, it’s correct to always refer to a trans person as their true gender, preferred pronouns, and preferred name, even if you’re referring to a time in their life when they were not yet living that truth. Lynn Conway was correctly identified as a woman with she/her pronouns, and this article does her a disservice through its mixed-up pronoun use.
That makes sense, but then the term “transition” seems incorrect. More of a “resolution”.
Transition can refer to different aspects like your appearance or how you present socially. So transition is still the right term.
That’s why the prefix “trans-” exists, not just for transgender people, but for other things like transportation, transposition, transition, transformation, Transjordan (sorry, I just HAD to make that joke), it simply means “the other side”.
That emphasized my point. If someone feels that they had always been a certain way in the past even though they didn’t look it or act it in public, there is no “other side” of themselves. I’m not trying to change the vocabulary, just was an observation of using a word past its usual meaning. That’s how words evolve.
There can still be another side, like I said, just in another aspect. Their gender identity might have been the same througout but their presentation would’ve probably changed with time. Thus a transition.
Exactly.
prefers to refer to their pre-transition selves by their current pronouns
so “I/me/mine”, right? :*P
Hah, got me there on a technicality.
An example though would be one friend I have who was telling me recently about a story from back when we were in high school. When quoting someone who was talking about her, she chose to use her current pronouns and current name even though realistically those wouldn’t have been used at that time. Even if it’s less “accurate” in a historical context, it’s a positive affirmation to be able to say “this is who I have always been, even if I couldn’t share it publicly at the time.”
And it also helps those in the present who may have never known her back then and might wonder who she was referring to. A bit like how one might talk about the childhood of Lady Gaga and not the childhood of Stefani Germanotta.
Also in the case you described when she talks to someone who didn’t know her pre-transition it would be a forced outing using the old pronouns and deadname.
Agreed, this is generally true, though personally as a trans woman, I prefer to refer to my child self with gender neutral terms. Others can refer to my child self with my current pronouns, or with gender neutral pronouns.
What they “felt on the inside” is not the same as what they actually were at the time though. Referring to them as he or she is just a statement of fact at the time.
We had this same thing when Ellen Page became Elliot Page. Then there was an attempt to retroactively change all references and make them Elliot Page, even though the work he did before was as Ellen Page.
It’s not transphobic to acknowledge the person they were before transition.
How about letting transgender people decide that?
I for one want to be referred to by my chosen pronouns even in the past pre-transition.
Exactly, why didn’t they just ask Lynn Conway for her preference when writing the article?
Well played
Trans person here. I vehemently disagree and would find this treatment exceptionally disrespectful.
I transitioned at 17 though; referring to someone who transitioned later in life can be somewhat different.
Why though? You were that gender, and then you transitioned to what you are now.
Just because you weren’t happy as your birth gender doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist.
Just because other people saw me as a certain gender doesn’t mean I actually was, especially not when it comes to my sense of self.
I’m not trying to erase something that existed, I’m asking my family to reframe my childhood from the way they saw it to the way I actually experienced it. They’re empathetic and they love me, so they do me that service.
I would ask a reporter attempting to cover my life story to do so in a way that’s consistent with how I want my life to be portrayed. Seems like basic respect.
I’m okay with it too. It adds context. If they referred to her as “she” describing the period she was a married father with kids it could be confusing.
You’re right, very weird use of pronouns in the obituary. I can only imagine that most of it was lifted from the article from 2000. That doesn’t excuse misgendering someone, they could have updated it for 2024.
Some people see their pre-transition selves as being one gender, and only use their post-transition gender to inform their new pronouns later. It was written by a person that interviewed her and apparently held her in high respect. All we can see is that there is an abrupt change in the pronouns, where Lynn presumably could have considered herself to match the new pronouns. We don’t know without asking her if she was misgendered by the article, and we are a bit late for that.
Because there’s several comment chains about the use of pronouns and I wasn’t quite sure where to add this, I decided to do a top level comment. She wrote an autobiographical retrospective of her transition on her University of Michigan faculty page twenty years ago about a transition that started long before that (and her main faculty page is a fascinating time capsule of trans history). When I came out as trans in 2012 her page was already a bit dated and the start of my transition, as I experienced it, was firmly in the bad old days. Conway was part of a much older generation of trans people, and there were narratives we had to force ourselves into in order to access healthcare, especially the ideas that we always knew and the idea of being born in the wrong body, and (in her generation but not mine) the idea that you had to be heterosexual post-transition. For some, it fit well enough, but for others it was an act for the doctors just to get life saving healthcare.
The obituary I posted reads like it was written twenty years ago and would have been incredibly respectful back then. It’s narratively in line with the framework of stories trans people had available to explain their lived experiences in the generation Lynn Conway was part of, and ones that Conway herself used extensively in her autobiographical work. I’m glad public understanding has grown and the narrative frameworks available have expanded. I feel like the obituary is in line with her own lived experiences as she understood them.
Thanks for posting her faculty page, I hope anyone who feels conflicted about the obituary reads it! It sounds like the obituary author knew her well and wrote from a place of mutual understanding and respect.
It’s an interesting question as far as dead naming as well. Normally it’s just a dick move or an accident because of old habits. But in the case of people who did important work that might be published under an old name it can be useful to get them the credit.
I’m a computer engineer so I looked up her work to see if I was familiar with it. I was wondering if I would need to lookup her dead name to find her important work. In her case her big book (which I recognized immediately and have on my shelf) was published after her transition so it wasn’t necessary.
If it had been written pre transition it would have been a shame to not know she was the author.
There’s some weirdness on that because she did some important but not-very-public work at IBM in the 60s with their ACS/“Project Y” effort that did what we later call superscalar/multi-issue processors like …20 years before those terms existed. As part of that she wrote a paper about “Dynamic Instruction Scheduling” in 1966 under her pre-transition identity that is a like retroactive first cause for a bunch of computer architecture ideas.
There was almost nothing about that work in public until Mark Smotherman was doing some history of computing work in the late 90s, put out a call for information about it, and she produced a huge trove of insider information after deciding it was worth exposing the provenance. There’s a neat long-form LATimes piece about the situation which is probably the primary source for the history in OP’s link.
The 2000 long-form piece and yesterday’s obituary posted by OP are written by the same person, Michael Hiltzik
…I probably should have checked the byline before posting. It does still come from the same material, just a little more directly.
Fantastic! She was a huge part of the military-industrial complex in computing and her entire work has to be viewed through that lens. While her contributions to the field are numerous and incredibly meaningful, she also wanted to help the military develop machine intelligence and is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children.
If you’re serious, please elaborate on your points. I genuinely don’t understand.
Going by Wikipedia here,
She was a huge part
Please define huge part. She was a “key architect” in the starting years of a project that fell short of its goals.
her entire work has to be viewed through that lens
Why? It was, relatively speaking, an almost small part of her career. She didn’t stay until the end of the project. You even admit that her contributions to the field were many and meaningful.
is every explicit way connected to modern conflicts where military misuses AI to murder children
This feels like such a huge leap, that I don’t even know where to begin tackling it. Is Tim Berners Lee in every explicit way connected to the modern privacy hellscape that is the modern internet?
Make no mistake, if she really did want to help develop artificial intelligence for the military’s sake, fuck her. I can respect someone’s achievements while also thinking they’re trash as a person.
But I don’t think that’s the case here, and I’m lost as to what point, exactly, you’re trying to make.
I have that textbook in a box somewhere
I cite Conway’s Law (and it’s reverse corollary) multiple times a week. I’m sorry to hear this, but her contributions were many and 85 is not a bad run. I hope she was happy and fulfilled, in the end.
Well, TIL! Darn famous computer scientists sharing last names. This Conway is still an icon.
It’s 2050. Every computer scientist is named Conway. ChatGPT releases its new version of Conway4, which scrapes every ounce of private medical data we have.
