Pioneering theorist, of cyberspace and much else, Sandy Stone wrote in The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto (1987) “I could not ask a transsexual for anything more inconceivable than to forgo passing, to be consciously “read”, to read oneself aloud—and by this troubling and productive reading, to begin to write oneself into the discourses by which one has been written…”  And now, a notable contemporary writer, a serial memoirist perhaps, has written herself into trans people’s history, as well as literary history, with this achy breaky book.

There are two tales, two trains runnin’, between I Heard Her Call My Name’s covers.  One tale is a story of Sante’s male to female transition in her sixties, something of which readers became dimly aware from her essays’ bylines even before her transition was featured in the February 2022 Vanity Fair magazine.  It’s harrowing, full of hesitations and worries and contradictions, but it's the story with the happy ending.

The other episodic narrative is of a young Belgian immigrant’s 1960s childhood, 1970s adolescence and 1980s urban gallivanting, affairs and marriages with women.  It might be subtitled Why I Was a Spoilsport, not fully engaged and present and delighted… because he was trying to keep it together, presenting as the wrong sex.  This pained section was written under the sign of Saturn, with a melancholy pervading this past now moonlit with the regret that it was Luc not Lucy trying to enjoy the fun, live in the moment, fully love the partner or spouse.

There is the confusing childhood as an only child—a state that I (as one) find understudied and dangerously misunderstood—with parents who moved in and out of the U.S. more than once.  A deeply unhappy mercurial mother provided a firehose of anguish, and a passive father provided scant balance.  Sante’s young adult adventures in NYC circa 1980 read like the late Duncan Hannah’s Twentieth Century Boy, notably druggy here in a way now attributed to Sante’s gender discomfort more sophisticated amusements. “I’ve never met somebody so uncomfortable in his skin” was what my wife said of a high school friend of mine, a few years before that friend’s own transition.

Françoise Hardy, who died the week I began this review, had been one of young Sante’s ideals of beauty and poise.  Experimenting with a female persona in FaceApp made the author realize the existential project ahead, and in early 2021 an announcement of transition was sent out.  I have found trans people sometimes want to avoid their “dead names”, and references to their earlier life as a person of the other sex.  As a public person with a distinguished record of publication, Sante is quite happy to excavate and interrogate her past, even publishing a photo of the balding gentleman she was.

I bet Lucy Sante had to get this book out of her system.  Not only to answer friends and the reading public’s inevitable snoopy questions, but to ponder her own transformation, its starts and stops, valor and fear, as she deservedly felt relief that it had been accomplished, a long-delayed liberation.  Perhaps there are things yet unresolved, unknown, unassimilated, not yet habitual and comfortable; some sentences have an implied “Ask me in five years” coda.

Besieging questions about Sante’s transition were probably occupying space that in the past—when gender dysphoria was stuffed down and out of sight—that would have been filled with busy research and reportage.

Sante has always been a Belgian detective, assiduous Hercule Poirot or plucky Tintin solving a mysterious case, applying the personal experience to the analysis. That which is, or had once been, interesting in a city is what interests Sante:  criminality and shenanigans in New York and Paris, crime scene and vernacular postcard photos, personages like the Mekons, Bob Dylan & Rene Magritte, Félix Fénéon’s short, sharp newspaper feuilletons and anarchist milieu.  Most recently—like London’s peripatetic Ian Sinclair rather than backstreets-strolling Baudelaire—interest in the regional reservoirs that hydrate the New York metropolitan area (Still hip?  Vampire Weekend sing of Water Tunnel #3).  There were earlier memoirs, sometimes essays centered on a personality or aspect of New York in the 1970s and 1980s, sometimes with admiration, even affection.  A belly-laffs and heartbreakingly tender eulogy in the New Yorker for Lou Reed in 2013.  Serious Sontag-esque film reviews too. Sante’s insights were elegantly delivered by a cool presence you felt was seated on a couch in the loft where the cultural history was being made.  Now in this book that era is addressed with sad detachment.

In my classes, I seem to average one transitioning student every school year, or a past student announcing transition on social media.  As I contemplated this review for this publication, I initially I wondered: is every trans person’s passage a work of tech art? Certainly, body artists like Orlan, or Stelarc with an additional ear on his arm, count as tech art… though neither, in their showy elective surgeries, tackle something so fundamental as gender. Instead, the transition process must be more like Michelangelo chipping away the stone that encumbers the beauty and integrity of the figure within. This isn’t an “Art” process as much as an alchemic transmogrification of someone’s very humanity, from something born wrong into something right.

A university colleague of mine who transitioned in her 50s was bullied by petty administration, left teaching, and moved out of her hometown. But our conversations, on Saginaw’s Theodore Roethke or Michigan rock n’ roll, continued unabated; a different gender didn’t seem to matter. Sante now perceives the ambiguity in some songs and text she’d written for her friends the Del-Byzanteens…but didn’t Lou Reed (source of the book’s title) get everybody writing songs like that?

I picked up Sante’s book, the latest by this essayist I’ve always found informative, in honor of that high school friend who transitioned male to female at about age 45 and died at 68 this spring, after years of immobility in a nursing home since taking too much of some recreational drug in 2017.  At that time, Anna was worried about Trump and increasing anti-trans legislation. In 2014 a vile, slithering demagogue named Gary Glenn won a Michigan State Senate seat by robocalling all voters with anti-trans calumny against Bay County’s moderate proposed Human Rights ordinance. And now 25 US states condemn trans youth expression and medical care.

My only two problems with the book are design issues: the first is that it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish where the tale of past urban adventures ends, and the new one of transition begins.  We’re reading of the 1980s, and the next paragraph begins “In November, …” and it takes a moment to realize we are now in 2021.  Might a different font have worked for each era?  My second gripe is its caption-less photographs.  We can figure out the parents (in the wedding photo p. 209, his mother’s features resemble Patti Smith’s), and the prim little Belgian boy.  And several apparently are of Sante in different stages of life, run through the FaceApp filter to be made female, a significant motif in her transition story.  But others are of women important to the narrative of the past, lovers and companions.  Are both past wives pictured? Are the several of a smiling lady with glasses the same person, or a favorite “type” encountered embodied in several individual intimates?  Only the late Eva Pierrakos is identified by name, for her life had an unhappy too-soon end.  For a book on the importance of identity, it is odd that there wasn’t a page at the front or back identifying persons in the photos.

In her 1987 Manifesto, Sandy Stone continued “But, although individual change is the foundation of all things, it is not the end of all things.  Perhaps it is time to be laying the groundwork for the next transformation…”  I hope this book is the doorstep to a quarter century more of rich essays by Sante, where the self recurs as a welcome spice, not the main course.