wendy carlos. an early pioneer of synthesizer music (she was a part of creating and popularizing the moog and even made a few synths of her own). she has lived out as a trans woman since 1968 and did the soundtracks for a clockwork orange, tron (1982), and the shining. i also own a copy of her album switched-on bach on tape and vinyl and it’s a masterpiece of synthesizer work. her website is also visually unchanged since the 90s.

beth elliott. a lesbian trans woman who was a folk singer in the 70s and made a lot of awesome songs. she was a huge part of her local lesbian/feminist organizing in her area in the time, serving in the leadership of many orgs. but in the orgs she served with, she was consistently harassed and attacked mercilessly by TERFs from within the orgs. i think her story goes to show that we have been, since the early days, instrumental in organizing these spaces with other feminists and lesbians and yet even back then they’ve attacked us for it.

i don’t know much about her life, but there’s a trans woman named linda phillips who wrote a little section about her life that ended up in feinberg’s “trans liberation: beyond pink or blue”. in it, she wrote a sentence that i think about every single day and one day i’ll get tattooed somewhere. “i have actually had the best of any life i could dream of”. in the face of medical professionals and transphobes and all saying how much it must suck to be trans and trying to define our existence by suffering, it is a bold statement that out of any of the lives she could have lived, this one where she lived out as herself was the best one she could have lived.