Thought about using the term idol, but idolizing people who we’ll never meet is bad. Who’s a trans person that you look up to just for making it?
My pick has to be Rebecca Heineman. Rebecca was one of the founding members of Interplay. As in OG Fallout Interplay. She was one of the lead developers of Wasteland, the Bard’s Tale series, Out of This World and many others. After founding interplay, she went on to do a lot of port work. Her work on the 3DO version of DOOM is an insane story, Stop Skeletons From Fighting has an amazing video on it.
Later in life, she moved onto consultant work. From Wikipedia “During this time, she also provided consultancy work directly for other companies: She acted as “Senior Engineer III” for Electronic Arts, upgraded engine code for Barking Lizards Technologies and Ubisoft, optimized code for Sensory Sweep Studios, provided training on Xbox 360 development for Microsoft’s development studios, and worked on the kernel code for the PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 4 at Sony.” Nowadays, she runs a company called olde skuul, probably best known for porting Descent 1 & 2 to modern machines.
I just think her story is really cool. I also like the reminder that we’ve always been there, yk?
I wish I could say I had any. Maybe it’s because of when I transitioned, I suspect I’m older than most on this board, but my only examples of transgender women were in pornography. Even once I understood there was a life for people like us outside of that, I had no positive examples or role models. It wasn’t until I’d been out for years that I started to see trans people in public life, but I guess the damage was done by that point, because I’ve never really been able to see myself in others like that, someone I could look up to and be like.