Very, very strangely, I once briefly dated a woman who knew someone who'd undergone such an operation under Medicaid, in my liberal midwestern university town. The news got out, and the funding got turned off, liberal though we may be. Being a little less tolerant at the time (18 or 20 years ago), I didn't pursue the issue much.
Somewhere in that time frame, in CS grad school, I saw Lynn Conway talk. People were struck by her, er, strangeness, but being perhaps a bit more tolerant on the celebrity front, I just figured she was a sort of mannish woman. It turns out that, well, she used to be a man. You can read her very interesting story at ai.eecs.umich.edu .
What no one knew till recently is that Lynn also did earlier pioneering research at IBM in the 1960's. Fresh out of grad school, she invented a powerful method for issuing multiple out-of-order instructions per machine cycle in supercomputers. By solving this fundamental computer architecture problem way back in 1965, she made possible the creation of the first true superscalar computer, and participated in its design at IBM. Lynn called her invention dynamic instruction scheduling (DIS).
By the 90's, chips held enough transistors so that entire superscalar computers could be put on single chips. Lynn's DIS invention suddenly became used in almost all the powerful new PC chips, making them much more powerful than they'd otherwise have been. Lynn's work thus had yet another big impact on the modern information technology revolution.
Most computer engineers thought DIS was a generalization of decades of work, and had no idea it had been invented in 1965. It caused Lynn great angst to see her wonderful invention so widely used, and described in all the computer architecture textbooks, without anyone knowing it was her idea.
#
How could this oversight have happened? Why did Lynn remain silent for over three decades about her IBM work?
The answer is that women like Lynn have lived, especially in the past, in a holocaust of stigmatization, persecution and violence. They could not reveal their past identities without risking great physical danger to themselves, and great harm to their careers and their personal relationships.
You see, Lynn was born and raised as a boy. It was a terrible mistake, because Lynn had the brain-sex and gender identity of a girl. However, back in the forties and fifties there wasn't any knowledge about such things, and Lynn was forced to grow up as a boy. She did the best she could at it, but suffered terribly from what was happening to her. She was still a boy and had a boy's name when she worked at IBM.
After years and years of trying to find help, she finally connected with the pioneering physician Harry Benjamin, M.D. in 1966, shortly after he'd published his seminal textbook The Transsexual Phenomenon. That text was the first to describe the true nature of, and medical solutions for, Lynn's mis-gendering affliction.
With Dr. Benjamin's help, Lynn began medical treatments in 1967. She became one of the very early transsexual women to undergo hormonal and surgical sex reassignment to have her body completely changed from that of a boy into that of a woman. Sadly, just before Lynn underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1968, she was fired by IBM for being transsexual and lost all connections to her important work there.
Also of interest, my wife recently read this book. " CROSSING A Memoir. By Deirdre McCloskey.", reviewed at archives.nytimes.com:80/plweb-cgi/fastweb?state_id=988818946&view=book-rev&docrank=3&numhitsfound=469&query=crossing&&docid=27173&docdb=bookrev-arch&dbname=bookrev-cur&dbname=bookrev-arch&numresults=10&sorting=BYRELEVANCE&operator=AND&TemplateName=doc.tmpl&setCookie=1
I did not know how difficult and how expensive it is to change sex, or that more than 25,000 Americans
have done so. Just for starters, the cost of getting rid of a male beard by electrolysis is a minimum of
$10,000. Sessions under local anesthesia can run as long as seven or eight hours at a stretch. Since only
about 40 percent of the hairs treated are killed at each attempt, retreatments -- strippings'' -- are
necessary. Only an ''active'' follicle can be destroyed; there is no way to tell in advance the stage of
growth of a treated follicle. At the second treatment, the percentage of regrowth is reduced to 36; the
third leaves 21.7, and so it proceeds. McCloskey was still going back for retreatment after two years of
womanhood. But before making the commitment to extirpating the beard, McCloskey scheduled
removals of hair on the backs of the hands, then arms, then back, legs and stomach. The dedication
required for this monumental task is mind-boggling.
After hair removal came a tummy tuck and breast augmentation. Then facial reconstruction: reduction of
the eyebrow ridge by grinding down the bones; cheek and jaw surgery, an operation to reduce the nose,
move the hairline forward, point the jaw, lift the eyebrows. The first voice operation was not successful,
nor were subsequent ones. Retraining the existing voice proved a better solution. ''Get a tape recorder,''
Deirdre was advised. ''Place your voice forward. Speak in your head instead of your chest. Articulate
more clearly. No harsh onsets.''
''Crossing'' details the often excruciating physical procedures undergone in making the transition, but the
book's major focus is on the gradual emotional evolution the writer experienced traversing from man to
woman. McCloskey was married, the father of two grown children, when he made the leap. |
