The first time Lucy Sante’s name ever appeared in print was as a misprint in the New Providence Dispatch. Around the age of 12, Sante was the only boy among five winners of a school essay-writing competition. In I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, Sante commemorates this precocious feat by reproducing a clipping of the winners’ names with the y in “Lucy” scratched out.
Whether this erasure was performed by Sante’s own hasty hand is not elucidated. But clearly only one name would do when the writer, hitherto known as Luc Sante, decided to transition from male to female at the age of 66 and finally become Lucy.
Sante’s deeply moving, often surprisingly hilarious memoir puts this belated transformation into sparkling perspective. She describes her gender dysphoria, which first manifested itself around the age of 9 or 10, as “the consuming furnace at the center of my life.” By toggling seamlessly between the past and the present, Sante observes that life as a coherent whole for the first time—something she had never been able to do before daring to open her own version of Pandora’s box.
“My secret poisoned my entire experience of life,” Sante writes. “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 had anything to do with it.”
She notes that much of her hesitancy about coming out as transgender stemmed from her “inability to square my gender identity with my attraction to women.” Having to break the news of her transition to her long-standing girlfriend and adult son from a prior relationship did not do much to calm those jitters. Both, it seems, took the news rather well, but as Sante expected, her girlfriend nixed any further romantic involvement.
The dam, as it were, had burst when Sante bought a new phone and decided to download FaceApp, in early 2021. She began using the gender-swapping feature obsessively, feeding in every portrait and ID-card image of her then male self that she could find. “When I saw her I felt something liquefy in my body,” Sante writes of the resulting images. “I trembled from my shoulders to my crotch. I guessed that I had at last met my reckoning.”
“My secret poisoned my entire experience of life. There was never a moment when I didn’t feel the acute shame of being me.”
After embarking on a course of weekly injections of estrogen, Sante soon began noting the physical transformations her body was undergoing: “Before long I had breasts the size of eggs, then the size of oranges. My skin had become extraordinarily soft, and the hair on my hands and arms disappeared, followed later by that on my chest and legs. I lost muscle mass in my shoulders and upper arms, and my natural waist asserted itself. Was my ass getting bigger? I had a hard time telling. My face was changing incrementally. My chin actually appeared to shrink; my eyes, the bellwether, became more alert.”
An exceptional prosaist, Sante, whose books have included Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991), Evidence (1992), and The Other Paris (2015), have tended to look at marginal figures inhabiting the cracks of history while slavishly avoiding any egotistical flourishes. But in I Heard Her Call My Name, we discover a life every bit as fascinating as those she has made it her business to document.
One of the memoir’s most poignant aspects is the way that Sante compares and contrasts her gender transition with the sort of transitioning she had to do “as an immigrant child becoming acculturated in the United States.” An only child who was born in Verviers, Belgium, on May 25, 1954, she writes about arriving in suburban New Jersey with her parents and attending first grade without knowing a word of English. “I was pretty much the only immigrant kid around,” she writes.
Later on, left at home alone, Sante recalls venturing “into my mother’s wardrobe, donning her panties, her bra, her slip, her dresses. But never for long.”
One cannot help but wonder whether Sante’s fractious mother contributed to her gender dysphoria after having given birth to an elder sister who was stillborn. “There were frequent references in her talk to la petite, sometimes wistfully and sometimes maybe as if she were in the next room,” Sante writes. “At other times she seemed to think that I was her. She often called me by feminine diminutives: ma fifille, ma chérie, ma choute (because chou is masculine she had to confect a feminine form).”
Sante hopes that her story will “be read by people who need to see that gender dysphoria, expressed in childhood or adolescence, is not a passing fancy that will evaporate when the social climate changes.” Since transitioning, she professes to being happier than she has ever been: “I lay in pieces for so long, but now I have, as the Mafia guys say, been made whole.”
Tobias Grey is a Gloucestershire, U.K.–based writer and critic, focused on art, film, and books
