American composer and musician Wendy Carlos was BOTD in 1939. Born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island to a working-class family, she was assigned male at birth, showing an early talent for music performance and composition. She studied physics and music at Brown University, before moving to New York to study music composition at Columbia University. After graduation, she worked with Robert Moog to develop the Moog synthesiser, one of the first electronic keyboard instruments. She rose to public attention with her 1968 album Switched-On Bach, in which she performed music by Johann Sebastian Bach on a synthesiser. An international bestseller, the album sold over a million copies and won three Grammy Awards, including for Best Classical Album and is widely credited with helping popularise electronic music. Carlos also composed electronic scores to Stanley Kubrick’s films A Clockwork Orange (featuring synthesiser versions of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 5th Symphony) and The Shining and later the sci-fi film Tron, which again were credited with popularising electronic music in film score composition. Identifying privately as female from an early age, Carlos began counselling and hormone treatment with sexologist Harry Benjamin in the late 1960s. Concerned about a negative response to her female identity, she wore fake sideburns and facial hair in public appearances to promote Switched-On Bach and her film composition work. She publicly came out as transgender in a 1979 interview in Playboy magazine, releasing all her subsequent music under the name Wendy Carlos. In 1998, she sued Scottish musician Momus for libel over his song Walter Carlos from the album The Little Red Songbook, which imagined her going back in time to marry her pre-operative male self. The case was settled in Carlos’ favour, with Momus agreeing to remove the song from future releases of the album. Fiercely protective of her privacy, Carlos criticised an unauthorised 2020 biography by musicologist Amanda Sewell, describing it as “fiction” and a misrepresentation of her and her family. Her current relationship status is unknown.