About me
I transitioned in my 50s.
Fashionably late.
I’m Stevie Bennett: software architect, former quant trader, parent of three, and late-blooming transsexual woman.
I spent decades living as someone I wasn’t. Then, in middle age, everything changed quickly: my body, my marriage, my work, my public life, my sense of myself, and the story I thought I was living.
“I did not destroy the person I was. I became even more the person I was.”
“I am the same uppity woman I ever was, and I think people quickly forget I’m transgender.”
Positive wins. It always does, in the end.
The stories about starting again, becoming myself and everything I didn’t see coming.
Read Fast Track FemmeWork
I’ve been building software since 1992. Some of it you’ve probably used.
The things that can’t fall over
- 01
The greenhouse-gas trading registries for most of the EU’s member states, built under Kyoto and talking to the UN.
- 02
The engine inside Homes England’s legal case system, one of the most important applications the agency runs.
- 03
One of the first Open Banking clients, connected to every major bank in the UK and Ireland.
- 04
A cloud storage platform designed for a hundred thousand people at once and billions of files.
- 05
Trading systems that put real money into live markets, including my own arbitrage engine across crypto exchanges.
- 06
A school network in Arusha, Tanzania, built from eighty donated PCs. I came home with malaria. Worth it.
NatWest · Schroders · Hewlett-Packard · Accenture · BT · IBM · WPP · Marks & Spencer · Trainline · Hiscox · Aspen Re · Defra · Homes England · Worldline · Interoute
“If she hadn’t contracted for quite so long she’d be CTO somewhere by now for sure.”
“She’s pretty funny and doesn’t suffer fools.”
“A refreshingly straight shooter and calls things as she sees them.”
My ventures
I’m doing rather a lot at the moment.
Some of it on purpose.
Helmworks
Agentic engineering, done properly.
Most people are still typing into a chatbot. I run a software company on agents.
Relay is the machine I built to do it. You give it a sentence. It plans the work and builds it with coding agents working in parallel across a fleet of machines, day and night.
Nothing ships on trust. Every piece is tested by independent reviewers against checks the builders never see, then released through a real pipeline, with every step on the record. And I make the decisions that matter.
Nearly 35 years of software architecture, with a team that doesn’t go home.
Need something built properly? Talk to me →
Become.
We can become.
I didn’t turn my entire life upside down in my mid-fifties just to settle for good enough.
I wanted to be beautiful. I wanted to be strong. Capable. Confident. And yes, I wanted to be hot as fuck.
I had an idea of the woman I wanted to become, and I went after her with everything I had.
And somewhere along the way, I realised something.
Why the hell shouldn’t we all have enormous ambitions for ourselves?
Why shouldn’t we want to look fabulous? Feel incredible? Transform our bodies? Take control of our health? Discover what we’re capable of?
Not because anybody says we should. Not because there’s some prescribed way of being a transgender woman.
Because we want to.
That’s what Become is about.
I’m building something for transgender women who want to make the absolute most of their lives. A place where ambition is encouraged, where experience is shared, where technology actually helps, and where the standards are every bit as high as they bloody well ought to be.
We’re starting with personalised transition planning, fitness and nutrition, and an ambition to make transgender healthcare considerably better.
But the products aren’t the point. They’re how we make the ambition real.
I want us to become the best fucking trans women we can be.
Beautiful. Hot. Strong. Capable. Whatever that means to each of us.
And I want us to have an absolute ball discovering just how far we can go.
Bradawl
Small, sharp tools for learning technology teams.
For the people who run learning platforms in universities.
Each tool finds one kind of problem before students do: rubrics that don’t add up, recordings that didn’t happen, courses that won’t survive a platform move.
Free to use. Made by Helmworks.
My publication
And I write.
Quite a lot, as it happens.
Fast Track Femme is my Substack
Fast Track Femme is where I write about what happens when a life has to be rebuilt in public.
12,000
articles read every month. Not bad for a specialist publication written mostly for transgender people.
Some of that is about transition. Some of it is about divorce, ageing, money, bodies, surgery, desire, voice, work, technology, artificial intelligence, class, grief, humour, and the strange business of becoming yourself much later than planned.
Follow me
I can also be very silly.
Mostly filmed on my phone. Occasionally in public.
