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.
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.
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 outwardly 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 (and retroactively) 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.
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.
I know there is variance among the community. Of my three trans friends 2 prefere being referred to by their post transition gender in the past tense and once preferes they/them.
A coworker who came out requested he/him until after they took time off for treatment and then she/her afterwards.
When asked if he wanted his name updated on an award plaque while away he said no. So when she returned we had only updated her door name plate and info in the company directory.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, I have no clue how she felt about the article from 2000, and obviously reading it with a 2024 lens is not fair to the original author. I am happy for her that the obituary didn’t deadname her like the original article did, and hope that she would have been ok with the pronouns used the way they did pre/post transition.
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.
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 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.
