Trailblazer

The book is a travelog of an interesting, colorful, and frequently chaotic life. At the same time it tells the story of the transgender movement from the 1960s to the present from her own unique personal perspective.

While primarily focusing on her transgender history, the book is littered with anecdotes about her career in tech, highlighting her influence on the internet and the industry.

The Technical Story 

So what does this have to do with USENIX? Well, the first and last page and many pages in between.  The first page of the book is an anecdote about attending the USENIX Summer Technical Conference in May 1987: “The event presented an unexpected opportunity. I could skip the first day of the conference and spend the day as a woman. Once I satisfied my curiosity, I hoped it would dispel these bothersome thoughts.” Instead of an opportunity to “get it out of her system”, it became a milestone in her journey to acceptance.

Horton was a member of the original BSD Unix team, sharing an office with some guy named Kirk McKusick (Hi Kirk!). Horton maintained “vi” for many years after Bill Joy became too busy with other projects. She invented uuencode/uudecode to solve the problem of sending binary files over email which, at the time, could only send 7-bit characters; thus crediting herself with inventing the email attachment. Horton moved to Bell Labs and was involved in early internet email and Usenet standards, co-authoring RFC 976 (UUCP Email format), RFC 1036 (Usenet message format) and others.

The last chapter (spoiler alert!) is about attending USENIX’s 50th anniversary of Unix celebration as a woman and finding everyone was cool with it. My, how far we’ve all come in six decades!

The Transgender Activism Story

Her anecdotes tell a very personal story about being a crossdresser and eventually identifying as transgender and (in her terminology) transexual. It also tells a fascinating story of her activism: first attending support groups then creating and running support groups; first advocating her employer’s lesbian, gay, bisexual employee resource group (ERG) to include transgender employees then advocating for health benefits for trans employees.

Eventually she details being part of the national transgender movement where she used her analytical skills to provide data dispelling the myth that transgender medical bills were too expensive for inclusion in employer healthcare plans. When people ignored that data, she found a creative way to get it the attention it deserved: she re-staged it in the format of The Price is Right game show.

My Thoughts

I enjoyed the book for many reasons. The book is clear and well-written. The technical details are explained in layperson's terms; the transgender aspects are explained in terms anyone would understand too.

Mary Ann is an excellent story teller.  She captures three intertwined stories—her personal life, her technical career, and her activism history—in a compelling way without being confusing. I found the earlier chapters to be more interesting, because there was more chaos and conflict.

The chapters about her first divorce are a real page-turner full of twists and surprises. I won’t spoil it for you but during the divorce there are revelations about her wife that are show-stoppers. The later chapters are less exciting as the chaos settles down and admittedly the last few chapters are a bit dry as a result.

I admit my enjoyment of the book is amplified by the fact that the author and I have overlapping histories. I was a member of the AT&T/Bells Labs LGBT ERG the same years she was; I was doing bi activism in New Jersey while she was doing trans activism in Ohio; I used all the same technologies she was a part of creating. Learning the backstories to events that I was tangentially familiar with made the book particularly compelling. It was similar to the excitement many people felt when reading Cliff Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg because it mentioned technologies and events we were familiar with.

That said, I think every USENIX member will find plenty of interesting anecdotes. Younger members will be particularly interested in learning about how different things were “way back then”.

However the most powerful part of the book is something that goes unspoken. It clearly details that social and technical change happens in many small steps. The popular perception of social, political, and technical progress is that it is the word of a few well-known leaders like King, Steinem, Milk, Lessig, Joy, Jobs, and Berners-Lee. The truth is that for every such leader there are thousands of individuals whose small contributions roll up to world-changing impact.

This book is a catalog of a life-time of small steps, each having a powerful impact years later. If you’ve ever thought that you couldn’t change the world, let this be your inspiration.