A Memoir of Transitioning
Image by Katie Rainbow.
The best writers are worth reading, no matter their subject matter. The wildly talented, idiosyncratic, and erudite Lucy Sante is a case in point. Sante is a versatile wordsmith who has appeared in the New York Review of Books for decades, been the film critic for Interview, the book critic for New York, the photography critic for The New Republic, and has been published in countless “little magazines” including The Threepenny Review. She even won a Grammy for some of her liner notes. I’ve been a fan since reading Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, her deeply researched history of crime and the hard lives of the poor in lower Manhattan in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, shortly after it came out in 1991.
Sante’s latest work, I Heard Her Call My Name, is a memoir of transitioning from Luc, the male name under which she functioned until her mid-sixties, to Lucy. Par for the course with Sante, the writing is sublime, filled with artful turns of phrase and droll asides. Though Sante’s The Factory of Facts (1998) was also a memoir of sorts, that earlier work played its cards close to the vest on the personal front. It includes the memorable line, “I had no illusions about genealogy, a pathetic hobby that combined the bold passion of stamp collecting with the modest sobriety of medieval reenactments,” but large chunks of the book dig into the history of the author’s rural Belgian forebears with a level of family tree forensics which seems at least partly a convenient avoidance of self-disclosure. It provides no hint of the gender dysphoria that Sante now recalls being a lifelong struggle.
I Heard Her Call My Name, on the other hand, delves deep into the gender confusion that Sante describes actively suppressing well into her sixties. Chapters on the period leading up to and including her gender transition alternate with sections on earlier parts of her life, from childhood in Belgium and New Jersey through wild times in Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s.
Sante participated in the first-wave NYC punk and renegade arts scenes, running around with artistically inclined movers and shakers, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jim Jarmusch, Sara Driver, and Darryl Pinkney. Her descriptions of the cash-strapped but creatively fecund milieus in and around what became known as Alphabet City are alone worth the book’s cover price. One choice passage: “All of us were performing all the time. It was what we had come to New York City to do. Every single person under forty walking down Saint Mark’s Place between Second and Third was acting in a movie only they could see. Band of Outsiders, Expresso Bongo, Ashes and Diamonds, Cruel Story of Youth, Baby Doll, Shock Corridor, Lonesome Cowboys, Night of the Living Dead. Sometimes you could just about call out the name of the picture when you saw them walk by.” (Her stellar collections of essays and experimental pieces, Kill All Your Darlings and Maybe The People Would Be The Times, are packed with great stuff on Sante’s friends, inspirations, and obsessions from that era.)
As the Eighties slogged on, the ascendance of finance, insurance, and real estate profiteers squeezed out bohemians from their formerly cheap digs, decimating the world that helped shape Sante’s esthetic orientation. In that progressively more gloomy decade, Sante writes, “Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ushered in the present sociopathic moral culture” and “we ate at restaurants where you were served seven squid-ink ravioli on a plate the size of a bicycle wheel.”
Despite displaying a slothful work ethic at her early ’80s New York Review of Books mailroom job, Sante was snagged by the highly-esteemed Review editor Barbara Epstein to be her assistant. Epstein must have noticed how well-read Sante was; her new employee was a lifelong autodidact who had immersed herself in broad reading of classic European and other literature. Sante closely studied Epstein’s sharply-honed editorial skills. Having Epstein school her in revising and improving essays helped Sante find her own distinctive voice. The New York Review of Books accepted the first piece Sante submitted to them, on Albert Goldman’s trashy biography of Elvis Presley. She took on a wide range of topics for paid writing assignments, including portraits of individual writers, artists, and musicians, cultural tendencies, and such offbeat history as the heyday of “spirit photography,” which purported to catch images of ghosts.
Sante describes an old romantic partner as having “a keen sense of the quackeries of language.” That fabulous compliment also applies to Sante, whose work embraces the esoteric and the eccentric, recovering and relishing forgotten slang and colloquialisms from previous eras and subcultures; Peter Schjeldahl, the late art critic for The New Yorker, aptly described her as “one of the handful of living masters of the American language.”
To Sante’s credit, she avoids misty-eyed sentimentality when drawing from the past: in her book Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930 (2009), she describes nostalgia as “the term Americans use for the bargain they strike between ignorance of the past and discomfort with the present.”
Affection and identification with women runs throughout I Heard Her Call My Name. A bohemian aesthete, very much drawn to fashion, Sante writes that as she eased into her identity as a newly-emerging woman in 2021, “I felt fortunate to have my friends: tough, stylish, independent-minded women, some of whom I’d known for over forty years and had seen evolve, who now weren’t kids anymore but were not in any way backing down. I modeled my attitude on theirs, and studied their style.” Sante exults over female role models in the wider world as well, listing a wonderfully eclectic mix which includes Eartha Kitt, Poly Styrene, Thelma Ritter, Emma Goldman, Anna Mae Wong, Memphis Minnie, Gloria Grahame, Dorothy Day, Helen Levitt, and Billie Holiday. Just to balance things out, “I inhabited Angie Dickinson as Police Woman.”
I Heard Her Call My Name clearly depicts the daunting process of transitioning to a freer, more fully realized life as Lucy, and coming out to family, friends, and acquaintances. Clocking in at 226 pages, a manageable length for even the most internet-damaged attention spans, the book includes a generous selection of photographs from Sante’s life. These include Sante head shots treated with the gender swapping feature of something called Face-App, which transformed old photos into images of the writer’s truer female self.
In describing the emotional terrain and practical realities of emerging as a woman, Sante’s honesty and attention to particulars keep her narrative free of strident polemics or grandstanding. Sante describes herself as a trans writer, rather than a trans writer. She writes, “I’m allergic to theory and even more to the kind of shibboleth retoric (and its principal by-product, a defensive posture) that pervades much — though by no means all — of trans writing. […] I don’t wish to be a spokesperson, although I accept that by writing this book I will have become just that.”
In this age of billionaire-backed fascists using weaponized transphobia to divide and conquer, I Heard Her Call My Name could hardly be timelier. The book inspires empathy and solidarity through its nuanced, powerful, and accessible account of Sante’s transformation from Luc to Lucy. Sante concludes, “I certainly hope that my 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.” So do I.
“Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports” the disembodied voice in the Trump ad says, oozing contempt. The voice goes on, driving toward the central slogan: “Kamala is for They/Them, Trump is for you.” Anti-trans ads are blanketing the country: in October roughly 41 percent of pro-Trump ads were anti-trans ads. This number shouldn’t be surprising — after all, the new Republican Party is built in large part on anti-trans politics. Outside of Trump, over 100 Republican candidates are running on an anti-trans platform. This is coming after a multi-year offensive against trans rights from Republicans at the state level which has left trans rights severely limited in over half the country. Trump has long made anti-trans attacks part of his campaign and is making them a central part of his closing message to voters. At his horrific Madison Square Garden Rally, Trump declared that “We will get … transgender insanity the hell out of our schools, and we will keep men out of women’s sports.” His rally speeches frequently feature the bizarre lie that young people are getting gender affirming surgeries in school — how exactly that would work is unclear, do the schools all have a secret surgical bay?
To put it bluntly, as a trans woman, it’s a scary time. The level of demagoguery that has been employed against trans people — especially trans women and trans youth — has reached a fever pitch over the last few years making things even more unsafe for trans people, especially trans women of color.
But one of the things that makes this all scarier is the way the national Democratic Party has backed away from defending trans people. And, despite what the Trump campaign wants you to believe, that definitely includes Kamala Harris.
Harris has been largely quiet about trans issues throughout the campaign. When she has spoken about them, it’s been worryingly non-committal: she will “follow the law” when it comes to things like gender affirming care for minors and gender affirming surgeries for incarcerated people. Out of context, this may not sound so bad. But within context, it’s horrifying. There are anti-trans laws in more than half the country that restrict the bodily autonomy of trans youth and, in some states, of trans adults as well. There are laws that ban discussion of queer issues in schools and force teachers to out students to their parents. There are book bans on queer and trans books alongside books addressing Black struggle. There are laws that ban trans people from using the correct bathroom — one city in Texas even went so far as to set a $10,000 bounty on trans people using the bathroom. Laws that ban trans people from updating their legal documents to match their gender and name.
These are the laws that Harris will follow? She’s not going to try to fight them? She’s not even denouncing them? This is a huge adaptation to the anti-trans offensive. It is equivalent to her saying she would “follow the law” on abortion. Trans rights vary hugely from state to state and in many states there are laws that absolutely should not be followed.
This adaptation to anti-trans politics is not new or isolated to Harris. In fact, it’s part of the Democrats’ larger shift away from trans issues. They didn’t have a trans speaker at the Democratic National Convention — for the first time since 2016 — and trans issues were only mentioned (briefly) by two speakers at the DNC, neither of whom had primetime speaking slots. Colin Allred, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas, responded to anti-trans attacks by the Ted Cruz campaign by releasing an ad where he calls himself a Christian and proclaiming “I do not support boys in girls’ sports.”
The national Democratic Party has been trying to downplay trans issues for essentially the entirety of the current anti-trans offensive. They didn’t make it a major part of their case for democratic rights in the 2022 midterms, focusing instead purely on abortion. In 2023, Biden sent out guidance on, effectively, how to ban trans kids from sports and only mentioned trans rights for nine seconds in his State of the Union to offer vague support for trans youth. Now those nine seconds look positively progressive compared to the way that Harris is avoiding the issue all together and adapting herself to the anti-trans laws on the books.
This shift from the Democratic Party is part of a larger shift within liberalism and the center that has occurred during the anti-trans offensive. This shift has a lot to do with the increase in people coming out as trans and doing so at a younger age. This has thrown many members of the middle class into a crisis because, though they might support trans rights in the abstract, they don’t want their kids to be trans.
A clear example of how this kind of middle class hysteria can build is the anti-trans community that developed on Mumsnet, a parenting website in the UK. These parenting message boards became the launching ground for a whole pseudo-movement against trans rights in the UK which took up pieces of anti-trans feminism and combined it with more conservative thought about the centrality of the family. This merging, not limited to Mumsnet, became known as the “Gender Critical” movement and it has become quite influential in the UK — JK Rowling is a prominent “gender critical” advocate — and began to spread over into the United States.
A suspicious eye towards transness from the bourgeois media in the U.S. is not a particularly new phenomenon but it took on an increased visibility when, in the midst of anti-trans offensive’s harshest phases, the New York Times began to publish several articles which cast doubt on trans youth’s identities. These articles were directed towards the Times’ readership — which is to say, largely, middle-class liberal readers — and sought to give them a “scientific” or “rational” basis for their “gender skepticism.”
This spoke to a shift in the Democratic Party base against trans issues, especially among middle-class parents in the suburbs who the Democrats definitely didn’t want to push away. So, rather than defend trans rights, the Democrats largely dropped it for more popular issues like abortion. Now, as the Republicans make hay out of painting Harris and the Democrats as big supporters of trans people, the Democratic response can basically be summed up in Harris’s comments: they’ll follow (anti-trans) laws.
As all this has been happening, the major LGBTQ+ organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) — who are linked to the Democrats — have largely been sitting on their hands. A demonstration may be organized on the local level but there have been essentially no moves to build a national movement for trans rights during the offensive. Rather, they fostered illusions that the courts would protect us and that we should continue supporting the Democrats. Relying on the courts is a dangerous strategy because we’ve seen time and time again, especially with the current hard-right Supreme Court, that these institutions will not protect us. History shows that we win our rights through class struggle. As we wait for the Supreme Court to hear a case on the legality of banning gender affirming care for minors, we should be clear that we cannot put any faith in them. We need to build a movement to defend our rights in the streets, in our workplaces, and in our schools.
Unions, especially those representing education and healthcare workers, need to stand up and take part in this fight for our rights. These attacks, in addition to attacking a community with strong links to both of these sectors, limit the ability of education and healthcare workers to actually do their jobs. The tremendous power that these unions hold need to be turned against these laws and we must fight with all the methods of the working class — work protests, sickouts, and walkouts — to overturn these reactionary, draconian laws. In this, we also need to start building student and worker unity so that student organizations like Gay-Straight Alliances fight alongside teachers and their union. Further, these unions can play a vital role in helping shift the discourse around trans rights. Education unions could host spaces where parents could come and learn about trans issues. Healthcare unions could hold meetings on how best to care for your trans child, and what to expect from medical transition in all its diversity. Workers and the trans community must lock arms and fight this struggle together.
It would be disingenuous to say or imply that Harris and Trump are equals on trans issues — clearly, Trump is far worse. But we should expect more from our representatives than the promise to not make things worse. The situation for trans people in much of the U.S. is dire, and the way to reverse that is through a concerted civil rights movement on the streets, in our workplaces, and in our schools that demands the repeal of all anti-trans laws and free gender affirming care for all who want it. We won’t win this from Harris or the Democrats, we’ll win it with our united power.
Sybil Davis
Sybil is a trans activist, artist, and education worker in New York City.
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