Penguin
Review by David Starkey
The paperback version of Lucy Sante’s I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition was published on January 21, 2025, the day after Donald Trump was sworn in as president and issued an executive order aimed, Trump said, at eliminating “transgender insanity.” The order states, “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States that there are only two genders: male and female.” Sex, the order further states, “shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. ‘Sex’ is not a synonym and does not include the concept of ‘gender identity.’”
Granted, even in the unlikely event that Trump, who is notoriously anti-reading, had read I Heard Her Call My Name, he probably would have been unpersuaded that “the concept of ‘gender identity’” is a complex issue worthy of sustained and subtle conversations. But I’ll take the arguments of Lucy Sante over Donald Trump any day.
What Sante tells us in her memoir is pretty straightforward. She has always identified as a girl and a woman, but she’s been petrified to admit those feelings, above all to herself. Now, after a lifetime of fear, guilt and double-think, when she is in her lates sixties and—after seeing herself as a woman in the gender-swapping Face-App—she has finally decided to transition, she is experiencing an exhilarating freedom: “I no longer felt timid; I didn’t give a hoot about being judged; I felt like I owned my body, maybe for the first time.”
Of course, her transition is not without its doubts and worries. When she sends out an email announcing her new gender, she “was prepared for some kind of pushback,” but, in fact, “most responses were yay, go for it, you do you.” However, that doesn’t keep her from wondering if she’s rushing into things, or just where exactly she fits in the realm of womanhood (a woman in training, she ultimately decides).
Whatever hesitations Sante has had about her own transition, however, she has no doubts, contra Trump and Co., about the reality of transpeople: “All of us became aware at some point that our assigned gender did not match our inner gender, and sooner or later we found the ability to take action…. It is clear from the historical record and from various non-Western cultures that there have always been people like us, although very few expressed their transness because of the exceptionally strong taboo.”
I’m proud to give this already much lauded book yet another positive review, although I must admit as a cisgender male a few years younger than Sante, I sometimes had trouble relating to her agonizing over which dress to wear, what wig to choose, or what sort of makeup to apply. Yet I suppose that is part of the point: here is the experience of someone unlike me made detailed and sympathetic. I am shown how certain of our concerns differ, and yet how both are equally valid.
The book toggles back and forth between the period of Sante’s transitioning and a fairly conventional autobiography from her childhood in Verviers, Belgium, to the present day. Inevitably, there’s a bit of overlap as she tells her story, but Sante is one of our premier writers of nonfiction prose, so, despite some redundancies, the journey is clearly and eloquently mapped out for us.
Really, though, any quibbles about style are irrelevant. I Heard Her Call My Name offers direct and incontrovertible proof that the Executive Order entitled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” is so much horseshit, not worth the paper on which it was written. The book reminds those of us who are allies to transpeople that we cannot look away from the madness in Washington, DC. Instead, we need to stand firm and tell Lucy, and everyone like her, “We stand by you, no matter what.”
