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’ll say Maddie Blaustein. She was a voice actor and dubbed Meowth in the Pokemon anime, which I watched a lot when I was young. It’s a bit silly maybe, but I liked how she managed to infuse that character with a tragic trans subtext and, separately from that, how she managed to use her voice as an asset. Like possibly everyone here, I worry a lot about how I sound (does my voice come across as male? female? real or inauthentic?), so I admire the range she had in voicing male, female and non-human characters, and she did all of that back in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, she died of a preventable illness because she couldn’t afford healthcare, which makes me sad every time I think about it.
She was frequently on Second Life as well in the mid 2000s. I ran into her a few times and had no idea it was her. She was a really prolific designer and I had a few of the beer bottle props she designed.
Also her brother Jeremy Blaustein was the translator, VA director, and mocap director for Silent Hill 2 and that’s wild to me