An fascinating story on pharmaceutical tycoon, entrepreneur, philosopher, Martine Rothblatt, the highest-paid female executive in America (earning $38 million last year), who was born male, in the latest issue of New York magazine. An excerpt;
In person, Martine is magnificent, like a tall lanky teenage boy with breasts. She wears no makeup or jewelry, and she inhabits her muted clothing—jeans, a T-shirt, a floppy button-down thrown on top—in the youthful, offhand way of the tech elite. Martine is transgender, a power trans, which makes her an even rarer species in the corporate jungle than a female CEO. And she seems genuinely to revel in her self-built in-betweenness. Just after her sex-reassignment surgery, her appearance was more feminine than it is today —old photos show her wearing lipstick, her long, curly hair loose about her shoulders. But in the years since she has developed her own unisexual style.
Martine prefers not to limit herself to available words: She’s suggested using “Pn.,” for “person,” in place of “Mr.” and “Ms.,” and “spice” to mean husband or wife. But “trans” is a prefix she likes a lot, for it contains her self-image as an explorer who crosses barriers into strange new lands. (When she feels a connection to a new acquaintance, she says that she “transcends.”) And these days Martine sees herself less as transgender and more as what is known as transhumanist, a particular kind of futurist who believes that technology can liberate humans from the limits of their biology—including infertility, cancer, and disease, but also, incredibly, death. Now, in her spare time, when she’s not running a $5 billion company, or flying her new helicopter up and down the East Coast, or attending to her large family and three dogs, she’s tinkering with ways that technology might push back that ultimate limit. She believes in a foreseeable future in which the beloved dead will live again as robots, reanimated by sophisticated artificial-intelligence programs that will be as cheap and accessible to every person as iTunes. ‘I know this sounds messianic or even childlike,’ she wrote to me in one of many emails over the summer. ‘But I believe it is simply practical and technologically inevitable.’
Read Lisa Miller’s full story here.
(Photo, Peter Hapak; via New York magazine)
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