June is pride month, a time where LGBTQIA+ people celebrate how far we’ve come in terms of gaining rights and acceptance for the queer community. There’s still a way to go too, which is why we protest as well as celebrate. As a gay tester I like to use this time to educate my teams on some queer history related to tech and show that LGBTQIA+ people have helped shape modern computing.
There’s a reason most of us never learned any of this at school. Section 28 banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools from 1988 until 2003, so a whole generation went through the education system with our history taken out of it. Did you learn any of this in a computing lesson? I didn’t. I talk about that in my Ministry of Testing talk and it’s why I keep writing this post… if nobody taught you then somebody has to.
Alan Turing
A mathematician and computer scientist who gave us the Universal Turing Machine, the theoretical model that sits underneath every computer you’ve ever used. He also gave us the imitation game, the test for whether a machine can convince you it thinks like a person. We call it the Turing test now and if you work anywhere near AI you’re still arguing about it.
In 1952 Turing was convicted of gross indecency for a relationship with another man. He was given a choice between prison and a year of oestrogen injections intended to suppress his libido (what we’d now call chemical castration). He chose the injections. He also lost his security clearance and with it the defence work he’d been doing.
He died on the 7th of June 1954, aged 41, of cyanide poisoning. The inquest recorded suicide. It’s worth saying that this verdict isn’t settled: Professor Jack Copeland has argued that the inquest was superficial, that the autopsy findings fit inhalation better than ingestion, that Turing always left an apple half eaten anyway and that he’d left himself a task list for the following week. The apple was never tested. What isn’t in dispute is what the state did to him while he was alive.
The UK government apologised in 2009, he was pardoned in 2013 and the 2017 law that retroactively pardoned other men convicted under the same legislation is informally called the Alan Turing law.
Christopher Strachey
A mathematician, computer scientist and gay man. Strachey was one of the founders of denotational semantics and a pioneer of time-sharing and he designed CPL, which led to BCPL, which led to B, which led to C. So he’s C’s great-grandparent rather than its parent, which is arguably more impressive.
In 1952, working alongside Turing at Manchester, he wrote a program that generated love letters. It picked adjectives out of Roget’s Thesaurus, dropped them into sentence templates and signed them M.U.C. for Manchester University Computer. They started appearing on the department noticeboard, addressed to nobody in particular and to no particular gender. Some of his colleagues thought it was a waste of machine time. It has since been read as the first work of electronic literature and as a queer reading of how we’re expected to talk about love and you can run the original in a Manchester Mark 1 emulator.
Strachey wrote about how a fairly simple trick could create the impression that a computer was thinking and how that could lead somewhere interesting. A gay man in 1952 worked out that convincing-looking language does not require understanding… which is roughly the entire conversation we’re having about large language models seventy years later. If you’ve read my posts on generative AI you’ll know where I stand on that and it turns out I’m late to the party.
Lynn Conway
A computer scientist and trans woman. At IBM in the 1960s she worked on the Advanced Computing Systems project and invented generalised dynamic instruction handling (out of order execution), the technique that lets a processor run instructions out of order rather than waiting for each one in turn. The Computer History Museum reckons ACS was probably the first superscalar design. That’s in the chip you’re reading this on, right now, doing its job.
So how did IBM say thank you? In 1968 Conway told them she intended to transition. They fired her. She lost access to her children under the law of the day, restarted her career from scratch under a new name and went on to Xerox PARC where she co-created the Mead-Conway VLSI revolution that made modern chip design possible. Two career-defining contributions, one of them made after the industry threw her out for being who she was.
IBM apologised. In 2020… fifty-two years later.
Lynn Conway died in June 2024. If you use a computer you have a trans woman to thank and if you manage engineers you have a worked example of what it costs when we get this wrong.
Edith Windsor
You might know the name from United States v. Windsor, the 2013 Supreme Court case that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act. But did you know she spent sixteen years at IBM first and that she got there on debugging?
Edie joined IBM in 1958 as a mainframe programmer and worked on systems architecture, operating systems and language processors. In 1968 she made Senior Systems Programmer (their highest technical rank at the time) and the thing she was known around the company for was her debugging. She owned the first IBM PC delivered in New York City. She also worked with the Atomic Energy Commission and got investigated by the FBI, which terrified her because she assumed they’d worked out she was gay.
Then IBM refused the insurance form where she named her partner Thea Spyer as her beneficiary. Forty years later the same denial, this time in tax form, is what she took to the Supreme Court and won.
IBM sacked Lynn Conway for transitioning in 1968 and told Edie Windsor in the same era that her partner didn’t count. Neither of those was a mistake by an individual manager; they were what the organisation was for at the time. Worth remembering when somebody tells you a policy is neutral.
She used to call activism her second career. Her first one was the same as ours and she was an awesome debugger (my favourite as a quality engineer).
Sophie Wilson
Computer scientist and trans woman. Sophie and Steve Furber built the prototype of the BBC Micro in under a week, winning Acorn the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project contract. She designed the operating system and wrote BBC BASIC (the one a lot of us learned on) and over a million BBC Micros went into UK schools. If you’re British and over about forty, she probably taught you to code.
Then in 1983 she designed the instruction set for the Acorn RISC Machine. Here’s the part I love: she wrote the ARM instruction set simulator in BBC BASIC and ran it on a BBC Micro, using one machine she’d designed to test the next one. That is exploratory testing with the highest stakes I can think of and the first ARM chip worked the moment it was powered on.
ARM is now the most widely used processor architecture in the world. If you’re reading this post on your phone, you can thank another trans woman for being able to do that. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Distinguished Fellow of the BCS, which feels like the right amount of recognition for once.
Anna Lytical
Software engineer and drag queen, who makes videos teaching people to code in full drag. She covers HTML, CSS and JavaScript for complete beginners and she’s doing something I think is underrated: making the tech space feel like somewhere you could turn up as yourself. You can find her on YouTube and on her own site.
Being out at work: the good bit
I talk about this properly in my Ministry of Testing talk, but the short version is that being out at work has mostly been good for me. Less energy wasted on hiding, stronger relationships because people are dealing with the actual me and honestly it just feels better. There’s the role model side too. LGBTQIA+ people are under-represented in STEM, so being visible shows other people they can do this as well, which widens the funnel for talent that would otherwise never apply.
The best part for me is smashing the monoculture (culture add not culture fit). I’ve used my own experience directly in my work and the clearest example is a pensions tool that wouldn’t let you select a Civil Partnership, which I found because of who I am and which would have put the system in breach of the law. That’s a bug and it’s the kind you only find when somebody in the room has a reason to go looking for it. There’s more on that in how diversity and inclusion improves our testing.
Being out at work: the not so good bit
So is that it then, job done? It isn’t all good and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anybody who’s weighing up whether to come out at their own job.
You’re not always safe. You can get outed in front of coworkers when you’ve got no idea how they’ll take it. Not every country you might work in has equal rights or non-discrimination law, so for plenty of people this isn’t a values question at all, it’s a safety one. Around two in five LGBTQ+ employees still hide who they are at work and nearly a third don’t feel they can be themselves there (in 2026), so if that’s you then there are a lot of us.
Being a role model gets heavy as well. Everything you do can get read through the lens of being LGBTQ+ and there’s a constant low level pressure to be good, so that you don’t end up being the reason somebody decides they were right about us. Rejection sensitivity is real too.
Then there’s not being seen as capable. You get invalidated as the token diversity one, or you end up fighting the monoculture instead of getting on with your job. Like the time I got dismissed as too emotional; a programme was running behind, the engineering manager wanted to cut some process out to claw back time and I asked whether we were happy that doing that meant ignoring the company’s definition of done. He told me, in front of everybody, that I was being too emotional. How do you even respond to that? Wouldn’t anything I said next just prove his point? I’m camp and I talk with my hands (anybody who’s seen me present knows this), so it was an easy thing to reach for and it worked. There’s no good answer to it either; anything you say next just feeds the story. I’ve written the whole thing up in I get so emotional, including what the research says about who gets allowed to have feelings at work.
Look at what I’d actually asked though. Definition of done. That’s about the least emotional thing a tester can ask about, the answer to it is written down somewhere. It still got called emotional… because the point was never the question.
There’s research behind this too, which I didn’t have when I wrote that post. Cech and Waidzunas surveyed 25,000 STEM professionals for Science Advances and found LGBTQ+ people reporting more career limitations, more harassment, worse health and more intention to leave the field. The bit that got me was professional devaluation, where colleagues rated their technical contributions lower. Not their manner… their engineering.
So if you’re already the person whose technical judgement gets marked down a bit, then caring out loud about quality gives somebody an easy way to avoid engaging with what you actually said. The next time you hear that a tester is too emotional or too negative, it’s worth asking whether that’s really about the argument they’re making.
Visibility matters, you are not alone
Why does any of this matter? Stonewall found that two out of five LGBTQIA+ children don’t learn anything about LGBTQIA+ issues at school and that’s the whole reason I do this. Seeing somebody who looks like us doing well tells us we’re allowed to do it too; that’s it really.
If you’re a queer engineer reading this and you’re the only one you know of on your team, you aren’t the only one in the industry and some of the people whose work you rely on every single day were us.
How you can help
Normalise using your pronouns. Introducing yourself with them shows you’re a safe person to be authentic around and it takes some weight off the people for whom coming out is a much bigger deal.
Educate yourself on queer issues rather than waiting for the nearest queer person to run a workshop for you (we’re tired).
Stand up for people and amplify queer voices rather than speaking for them.
Check who your defaults exclude. Title dropdowns, gender fields, name change flows, relationship status options. Go and look at yours.
Say the quiet thing out loud. If somebody’s contribution gets talked over or quietly downgraded, name it in the room while it’s happening.
How companies can help
Support your D&I groups and make them visible. A group nobody can find isn’t doing much.
Run education for line managers. My too emotional story was a line manager, in a meeting, in front of a team. That’s where this gets decided, so that’s where the training needs to go rather than being left to whoever on the team is brave enough to speak up.
Show that you support pride openly, including in the years when it feels awkward to. Anybody can put a rainbow on a logo in a good year.
For anybody who wants to go further, Stonewall is the obvious starting point and the Albert Kennedy Trust do work with LGBTQ+ young people facing homelessness that I’d point anybody at.
So happy pride everyone. If you want to talk about diversity, queerness or about quality then I’m always up for it.