Lucy Sante, _I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition_

I HAVE BEEN reading Sante for years, but always in pieces in periodicals, mainly book reviews in NYRB, so this is the first of her books proper I have read. I should try some of the others, though, for this one is excellent. Sante’s prose is light-footed but sinewy, her curiosity omnivorous, and the subject matter here of unusual interest.

After living sixty plus years as an assigned male, Sante realized she was actually female and set out upon the transition mentioned in the book’s subtitle. The book begins with the email she sent to her friends announcing this new departure (which began, remarkably, with a photo app that can switch the photographed person’s gender). Roughly half the book tracks how Sante managed that transition, and roughly half recounts his first sixty years as an assigned male, with particular attention to a chronic anomie that she now sees as a sign that she needed to transition.

I Heard Her Call My Name does not go into what surgical or other medical treatments Sante pursued, apart from taking hormones, nor into how the transition played out in her sexuality; that is, it skips the whole tabloid side of the story. What it does do is make vivid and palpable the unnameable tension Sante was living with as a man and the immense relief it was to live as a woman. What possible compelling state interest could there be in denying people like Sante the opportunity to live as themselves? The book deserves its wide audience not only for its writing, which is brilliant, but also for raising that question.