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?
For me it’s gotta be Laura Jane Grace. Her coming out was such a huge deal to me as a young punk egg and seeing a trans woman be a punk who wasn’t dressed super femme all the time really made me feel less alone.
her music saved my life when i came out and as i was navigating life as a trans woman for the few years after coming out. seen her every time she’s toured through my state with whatever band she’s doing stuff with. her book is a really good read and she’s a very inspiring person.