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?
Jeanie Alexander is extremely cool to me
This is fucking awesome to me. My mom had a chair that was of great comfort to her as a kid, and it's a Jennie chair. Crazy how trans people have been cornerstones of so many things we consider to just be part of our world. Someone else I think you may find cool (she's in tech but made MUCH greater contributions) is Sophie Wilson. This woman was a massive part of inventing the ARM cpu architecture. As in the architecture on any phone or small computers in the past 40 years. In the same way that my time out chair was designed by Jennie, all of our phones are dependent on the work of Sophie. Even down to our phones and chairs, we were always there.