In early 2021, the writer Lucy Sante sent an e-mail to her closest friends. Its subject was “A Bombshell,” which Sante later joked was an unintentional pun. In the text she attached, she explained that at the age of sixty-six she was accepting her long-suppressed identity as a transgender woman.
Her transition had been catalyzed by an interaction with artificial intelligence. That February, Sante had downloaded FaceApp, a photo-editing application that uses neural networks to generate realistic transformations of people’s faces. “For a laugh,” she wrote to her friends, she’d uploaded a photograph of herself into the app’s gender-swapping feature. It returned “a full-face Hudson Valley woman in midlife.” Sante was undone. “When I saw her I felt something liquify in the core of my body,” she wrote. Other metaphors follow—the bursting of a dam, the opening of Pandora’s box—for what had been held back for most of a lifetime and could no longer be wished away: a female identity that was “the consuming furnace at the center of my life.”
This e-mail announcement, which runs several pages, opens Sante’s memoir of transition, “I Heard Her Call My Name.” The letter is a raw and still uncertain text, written as she tries to understand the process by which she ignored her own longings for decades. “I wanted with every particle of my being to be a woman, and that thought was pasted to my windshield, and yet I looked through it, having trained myself to do so,” she told her friends. In her memoir, the e-mail marks the fulcrum between the secrecy of her past and her more open future. The book is divided into two parts: one is autobiographical, beginning with her childhood in Belgium and her suppressed girlhood, which began making itself known when she was nine or ten years old; the second follows the logistics of the first year of her transition, both its euphoria and its rough patches.
Sante’s autobiographical story contains another difficult transition, that of her trying to figure out how to become an American as a child. Born a Walloon, the French-speaking ethnic group in Belgium, Sante immigrated to New Jersey with her parents in the nineteen-sixties. In other realms of her life, she successively cast off the social world into which she was born. She was the first member of her family to graduate from high school; she rejected her mother’s strict Catholicism; she was kicked out of her all-boys Jesuit private school, in New York, in part for cutting class. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Sante lived in the heart of downtown New York’s creative scene, working at the Strand bookstore, hanging out at CBGB and Mudd Club, going to Patti Smith shows, and having a circle of friends that included writers and artists such as Darryl Pinckney, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Jim Jarmusch. She had shed her background to fit into this free-spirited milieu, only to find that the sense of needing to convincingly perform an identity never quite left her.
The transition into womanhood, once Sante pursues it, is easier than repatriating—it was trying to be a man for most of her life that was exhausting. Once on the other side, almost everything is straightforward: she finds a trans mother more than forty years her junior; she joins chat groups; she visits an endocrinologist; she figures out what clothes she prefers and how to do her hair. Although she has always felt most comfortable around women, she initially finds it a challenge to drop the male act in their company. “I had tried so hard to be a heterosexual man that the need to behave like one took me over like a puppeteer whenever I found myself in the presence of a woman I found attractive,” she says. She is deferential to the cis women around her, anticipating more criticism than she gets, except perhaps in instances where her euphoria causes an oversight, such as when she chooses to announce her identity to her Instagram followers on her partner’s birthday. Their relationship, which at the time of her transition had lasted fourteen years, does not survive the change, which Sante accepts but laments.
The memoir is animated by the question of how Sante kept her identity secret from herself and from others for nearly six decades. In her young adulthood, she writes, her longing to live as a woman was closer to the surface but got buried as she grew older, and suppressed fantasies she told herself were “perversions.” When she was old enough that her parents let her stay home alone, Sante would try on her mother’s clothes. She can recall with specificity chance encounters with women’s clothing—a blouse left behind in a new rental apartment that she tried on and then threw away in shame, a pile of women’s clothes left unclaimed on a dryer in a laundromat that she considered stealing. Sante writes that she was ignorant about trans identity. She was romantically and sexually attracted to women, and thought women would reject her if they knew she was trans.
Even lighthearted brushes with gender play could provoke anxiety—Sante lived near the East Village’s Pyramid Club, which was known for its drag performers, but never went to its drag shows, or to Wigstock. The band the New York Dolls performed in drag; Sante avoided them. She was close for a time with Nan Goldin, famous for her photographs of her trans friends, but never confided in her, and was too envious and frightened of trans people to try to befriend them. The LSD experiments of her youth were precarious: “gender dysphoria regularly came up in my trips and caused me pain and horror,” she writes, recalling the paranoia that her “weird secret” would make itself known. The body she wanted seemed unattainable; the thought of having breasts and a vagina filled her with “existential terror.” Glimpses of possibilities seared themselves into her memory: a two-inch photo of a woman with a penis posted on the door of a porn shop in Malmö, Sweden, in the nineteen-seventies; ads for the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries in the Village Voice; a photo caption from Sante’s school days in which a typo gave her the name she would later choose: Lucy.
She found ways to cope. “I created a male persona that was saturnine, cerebral, a bit remote, a bit owlish, possibly ‘quirky,’ coming close to asexual despite my best intentions,” Sante writes. It was always a performance, one that made social life exhausting. “Maleness did not appeal to me at all, with its acrid musk, its stubble, its needful dangling genitalia, its oafishness and clumsiness, its sense of mission and conquest, its resemblance to the aspects of myself I most despised.” She didn’t identify as being male, but could not fully visualize a social category to which she belonged. Trans representation in media in her youth was rare or merely comedic. She had heard some of the arguments of trans-exclusionary feminism and worried about claiming a gender identity without having undergone certain physical experiences of the female body. Then, there was her writing career, and an intellectual milieu where the cis-male experience was read as the center of human thought. “I wanted to be a significant writer, and I did not want to be stuffed into a category, any category,” Sante writes. “If I were transgender that fact would be the only thing anyone knew about me.”
Sante published her first piece in The New York Review of Books, where she worked in the mailroom and then, in her late twenties, as an assistant to its co-editor Barbara Epstein. Her career has since been marked by books that celebrate cities and their subcultures. “Low Life” (1991) is an account of nineteenth-century New York’s criminal underworld (Sante was a consultant on Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York”) and “The Other Paris” (2015), a similar study of that city. In “I Heard Her Call My Name,” Sante comes to see that the impersonality of her earlier work was an attempt to avoid confronting her identity. In the late nineteen-nineties, Sante wrote a memoir, “The Factory of Facts,” but it is more a study of her working-class Belgian background than a personal narrative. “I was dodging self-depiction because I didn’t want to be seen,” she now writes. “I didn’t want to be seen because I didn’t know who I was.” Her 2022 book, “Nineteen Reservoirs,” is about the source of New York City’s drinking water.
In writing, she could do what she was never certain she was achieving in person—pass as a man. “Writing was the arena in which I felt the most confident, and thus was my claim to, as it were, masculinity,” she writes. “In the absence of any other notably masculine qualities, it became the principal signifier of my male identity, and gradually my social personality became coextensive with my work.” Her male persona “was in many ways a walking byline.” Unable to feel male in her body, she could let her prose act as the disguise.
She admits that part of acting male was perpetuating sexism. After her transition, she confesses to mortification at the memory of a reviewer who observed that “Kill All Your Darlings,” a 2007 collection of some of her cultural essays, did not contain a single female subject. “I had unconsciously subscribed to the dick-matching ethos that still prevailed,” she writes. “Men’s work was serious, a life-or-death struggle to reach the top. Women’s work, in the world I entered in my youth, was always asterisked, italicized, special-categoried, exceptions made for, not entered in the main competition.”
In “I Heard Her Call My Name,” she tries to rectify this imbalance with loving recollections of women mentors and artists who influenced her, including Smith, Epstein, Françoise Hardy, Eartha Kitt, and Elizabeth Hardwick. Post-transition, however, Sante owns up to missing the invisibility of maleness, whether walking down the street late at night or having an identity as a writer that is read as neutral. “In the spirit of my friend Darryl, who years ago declared that he was not a gay writer but a writer who is gay, I am a writer who is trans,” Sante says. She, for now, believes that avoiding being read as a trans writer instead of a writer who is trans is a question of keeping one’s prose free of annoying jargon. “I’m allergic to theory and even more to a kind of shibboleth rhetoric (and its principal by-product, a defensive posture) that pervades much—though by no means all—of trans writing,” she notes. I read the near-absence of the pervasive contemporary catchall “queer” in her book as a generational marker; few neologisms appear. “There is nothing of the politician about me,” Sante adds.
In a work that is otherwise marked by clarity and self-awareness, there is something willful about these efforts to avoid appearing “defensive.” The logistics of a recent transition in upstate New York, where Sante lives, are different than they would be in a story about transitioning in Florida right now; the national context in which dozens of laws have been passed with the intention of erasing trans people from public life and hindering their access to health care goes unmentioned in her memoir, and there’s little acknowledgment that transition is not only a reckoning with the self but with a society. But it’s understandable to want to shield one’s own life story from right-wing hatred or identitarian jargon, and to downplay the entanglement of gender and government in order to focus on the quieter experience of self-inquiry, to hold it separate from the outrage cycle. Sante’s experience speaks to how transphobia gets metabolized in the mind, even for someone in a social circle in which she was rarely exposed to outright bigotry.
On the other side of her transition, Sante is finally able to assess the cost to her social life and well-being of keeping a secret from herself for nearly six decades. The book is most powerful as a depiction of the agony of suppression. The danger of revelation was particularly acute for Sante in areas where a person longs to be most open: in intimate relationships, in sexuality, in drug use. After losing friends to AIDS and addiction, and the downtown New York she loved to corporate interests, she married multiple times, had a child, wrote, and taught—but, she says, “I spent middle age behind a wall.” Her inability to be herself in public made her retreat from social life; cornering herself into a patriarchal family made her resentful at home. Her difficulty accepting her gender was compounded by a sense that it was too late in life to indulge in what she still thought of as fantasies. “I’m lucky to have survived my own repression,” Sante concludes. Now, she says, “I am the person I feared most of my life. I have, as they say, gone there.” ♦
