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Comment by demallien | Hacker News Reader

Worst bit:

Showing a photo of Wilson pre-transition. It added nothing to the story, being just a mug shot. I doubt she's happy about that...

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In that part of the article, they were talking about developments from the mid 80s, when that picture was taken. If you were writing an article about, say, the song "Thriller", would you include a picture of Michael Jackson in the iconic red suit, or would you pick one from his days in the Jackson Five, or from the late 2000s?

Wilson underwent a sex change at some point, yes. But is it really useful or right to pretend that at no time did she ever look like a brown-haired man? I will not pretend that I can read her thoughts on the matter, but in my own opinion it would be rather petty and stupid to demand that all pre-transition pictures of oneself be destroyed or never shown again.

Nobody can change the past. Pictures of faces are good in articles about people and events since humans are wired to respond to faces so I don't see that it didn't add anything. Therefore I'm not sure that it was out of line. But it's possible that I'm just tone deaf to to the polite/compassionate thing here.

Her Wikipedia article says "In the BBC television drama Micro Men a young Roger Wilson is played by Stefan Butler and Wilson herself makes a cameo appearance as a pub landlady.", I wouldn't think she has that much of a problem with it if she appeared in a movie with herself portrayed pre-transition.

If you just want to show Wilson's face, you use a current mug shot, not one dating from 20 years ago. If it was a photo of Wilson soldering up a circuit, or working at a computer during the ARN project, then sure, use the photo as it is showing something about the development of the ARM processor, the putative subject of the article. But even then I would hesitate with annotating the photo as being of Wilson, I'd probably tend towards using a generic term, like 'an Acorn employee' or 'one of ARM's designers'.

Why? It doesn't seem at all unusual to use from-that-time photos of the other people who worked on the project, does it?

I actually had no idea about the whole thing. When I read the picture's subtext on the second page with the name Wilson, but was reading about someone I thought to be a woman, I became confused. The next couple paragraphs completely threw me out of the water with the quote "Sophie did it all in her brain", when Sophie is very clearly shown to be male. I had to come here to get some context, or at least make a remark on how the author clearly published the wrong photo.

Not knowing what she cares about in this context, I would agree the picture, while accurate for what it represents, is entirely unnecessary and detracts from the article. Especially for someone like myself, a total stranger, who just didn't know and frankly doesn't care about her personal life that deeply.

That said, the article on ARM is pretty fascinating.

I thought that a little off, too. But, I know nothing about her except for (a) her work (which I've long admired), and (b) that she used to be a man. Perhaps she is generally known just not to care what people might think about (b).

That said, I would have left the photo out myself...

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