Martine Rothblatt, the highest-paid female CEO was born a male. To be specific, she belongs to the category of trans genders.

Roughly five percent of the Fortune 500 companies are run by female CEOs and those five percent also earn way less than their male counterparts. While we keep hearing of Pepsi’s Indra Nooyi or Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer we seldom hear of Martine Rothblatt who is the highest paid female CEO.

Martine Aliana Rothblatt Ph.D, MBA, J.D. (born 1954 as Martin Rothblatt) is an American lawyer, author, and entrepreneur. She is currently the founder and CEO of United Therapeutics and the richest female executive in the world.

She was born in Chicago but got raised in southern California. Born as Martin Rothblatt, she married Bina Aspen in 1982 . In 1994 she had a sex reassignment surgery and became Martina Rothblatt.

This summer when she became the richest female CEO she said she could not be expected to be an exemplary for women because “I can’t claim that what I have achieved is equivalent to what a woman has achieved. For the first half of my life, I was male.”

 

From NYMAG

In 1995, just after her transition, Martine published The Apartheid of Sex, a slim manifesto that insisted on an overhaul of “dimorphic” (her word) gender categories. “There are five billion people in the world and five billion unique sexual identities,” she wrote. “Genitals are as irrelevant to one’s role in society as skin tone. Hence, the legal division of people into males and females is as wrong as the legal division of people into black and white races.” Instead, she suggested people might better express their gender and sexual identities on a spectrum, perhaps in terms of color: Green might be “an equally aggressive/nurturing person who does not try to appear sexy” (lime green would be someone a little less aggressive), and purple might be someone gentle, nourishing, and erotic in equal measure.**

* *