Life was not easy for young Lynn, who was born and raised as Robert, the first son of middle-class parents in Mount Vernon, NY. In those years, the forties and fifties, people did not know of such a thing as gender identity disorder, and hence Lynn, who had the brain-sex and gender identity of a girl, was forced to grow up as a boy. She did the best she could at it, but suffered terribly from what was happening to her. She was still a boy and had a boy's name when she worked at IBM.

As Robert, Lynn received her MS in electrical engineering from Columbia in 1963, and joined IBM Research at Yorktown Heights, NY. At IBM she did pioneering research. This research remained anonymous for many years, due to the secret nature of the IBM project, which was disbanded in 1968.

After years and years of trying to find help, she finally connected with the pioneering physician Harry Benjamin, M.D. in 1966, shortly after he'd published his seminal textbook The Transsexual Phenomenon. That text was the first to describe the true nature of, and medical solutions for, Lynn's mis-gendering affliction.

With Dr. Benjamin's help, Lynn began medical treatments in 1967. She became one of the very early transsexual women to undergo hormonal and surgical sex reassignment to have her body completely changed from that of a boy into that of a woman. Sadly, just before Lynn underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1968, she was fired by IBM for being transsexual and lost all connections to her important work there.

Lynn's case was a first at IBM. The idea that a professional person would seek a "sex change" totally shocked IBM's management. Most transsexual women seeking help back then were from among those who worked as "female impersonators" or as prostitutes. Only those who were sure they could fully pass as women, who were totally desperate and who had nothing to lose, dared to change gender back then. When top IBM management learned what Lynn was doing, she was fired in a maelstrom of animosity.

After surgery and with her new name, Lynn started her career all over again. Moving up through a series of companies, she landed a computer architecture job at Memorex in 1971. In 1973, she was recruited by Xerox's exciting new Palo Alto Research Center, just as it was forming.

Barely ten years after her gender transition, in 1978, Lynn had already achieved wide recognition in her field. By then she was writing a seminal textbook on the subject, and she headed off to academia, where she found a challenging niche, joining the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1985.

Lynn went on to win many awards and high honors, including election as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional recognition an engineer can receive. She is now Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Emerita, and she also served for many years as Associate Dean of Engineering. She now lives on country property in rural Michigan with her husband Charlie. They've been together since 1987.