When President Trump signed an executive order that the federal government, in an effort to end "transgender insanity," would recognize only two unchangeable sexes, he began the long process of legislating transgender people out of existence, such as defunding gender-affirming medical care and banning them from serving in the military.
If only Trump had read Lucy Sante's memoir of transition (just published in paperback), no one could doubt the reality of gender dysphoria and its deleterious effect on her life. Moments of doubt, shame, unworthiness, and fear were etched within her body. The memoir is a cautionary tale on the perils of suppression and the joy of acceptance.
Despite always identifying as a girl and a woman, it was the gender-swapping Face-App she discovered on her phone that gave Lucy the courage to transition. It was an opportunity to see what she'd look like as a woman, as she fed the app, pictures and ID-card images taken of her throughout her whole life. Those snapshots are printed throughout the book.
"She was me. When I saw her, I felt something liquefy in my body. I trembled from my shoulders to my crotch. I guess I had at last met my reckoning." It was an awakening "when my egg cracked, I simply stopped being able to lie to myself."
Then/now
The book opens with an email ("A bombshell") she sent to 30 friends and colleagues proclaiming her gender identity at age 66, declaring that being a woman "was the consuming furnace at the center of my life." Her only regret was that she put it off for so long. Her transition ended a 14-year-old romance with a woman after she showed her the Face App photos.
She attempted to salvage the liaison by writing another email almost retracting her previous revelation, saying she was "sticking with Luc for now." She soon realized there was no turning back even if it ended her relationship. "It was not so much that I had betrayed Mimi's trust, but that I ever honestly earned it."
The memoir switches back and forth between past and present, but threads into one story. Born as Luc in Belgium, her conservative working-class Catholic immigrant parents emigrated to the U.S., settling in suburban New Jersey. They were mourning their stillborn daughter so they couldn't embrace Luc, her mother calling Luc by feminine diminutives (when Luc wasn't going into her mother's bedroom and wearing her bras, slips, and dresses). She came to hate her mother "so intensely it was almost like love."
Her gender dysphoria began around age 10. At age 12, Luc won a school essay-writing competition on Arbor Day. In a newspaper clipping listing the winner's names, a y was added to Luc, a typo which had mammoth repercussion years later. The struggle to transition becoming an American and finding a cultural community parallels her gender transition.
"My secret poisoned my entire experience of life. There was never a moment when I didn't feel the acute shame of being me, even as I denied to myself that my secret has anything to do with it."
Bohemian rap
Luc became a writer and in the 1970s/1980s aligned with the free-spirited Greenwich Village bohemian scene, a punk aesthete constantly high on drugs (mostly amphetamines), working at the Strand bookstore, partying at CBGB and Mudd Club. She formed a band with director Jim Jarmusch, and hung out with other artists like Patti Smith, Darryl Pinckney, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and photographer Nan Goldin. Despite socializing with gender nonconformists and drag queens, she didn't feel free enough to be herself. She was too frightened and envious of trans people she did meet, to become friends with them.
Luc became editor Barbara Epstein's assistant at the "New York Review of Books," giving her "the ability to arrogate unto myself the authority to speak." Luc published various kinds of literary journalism and newspapers. Luc later wrote nonfiction books like the classic 1991 urban history "Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York," establishing a name with her exceptional prose.
"Writing became the principal signifier of my male identity and gradually my social personality became coextensive with my work. My work didn't reflect me; I reflected it." She taught at Bard College for 27 years. She even wrote a memoir but avoided any "self-depiction because I didn't want to be seen and I didn't want to be seen because I didn't know who I was."
Luc was deeply attracted to women, afraid they would reject her if they knew she was trans. She married twice and parented a son. It was her "inability to square my gender identity with my attraction to women," that delayed her coming out as transgender. Confessing her maleness was always a performance that exhausted her. Lucy admits not wanting to damage her reputation as a significant writer also gave her pause, nor did she want to be categorized as a trans writer.
The second part of the book follows the logistics of her first year of transition: visits to an endocrinologist, subcutaneous injections of estrogen, meeting other trans women (all younger), figuring out what clothes and jewelry to wear, how to put on makeup, style her hair, and sit like a woman. But just as important, she's becoming more social and open toward the world. "I felt like I owned my body, maybe for the first time."
The book is full of piercing insights, observant in its frank analysis, absorbing, humorous and trenchant in her self-criticism, but ultimately affirming, even celebrating womanhood. It could well become the standard reference for transgender people transitioning in mid-life. One can't help but be moved by her conclusion:
"I'm lucky to have survived my own repression. I am the person I feared most of my life. I don't mind representing myself as someone who found happiness by confronting the truth. I lay in pieces for so long, but now I have, as the Mafia guys say, been made whole."
So will anyone who reads her exhilarating if painful journey.
'I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition' by Lucy Sante.
Penguin Books, $18. www.penguinrandomhouse.com
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