In the past two years I’ve read a lot of trans memoir, autofiction, and fiction mistaken for autofiction. It’s been a minute since any hit me like Lucy Sante’s (@luxxante) I Heard Her Call My Name. The book came my way via the @gendereveal podcast, and then via a friend who sent me the NY Magazine feature and said “I see parallels”
Hitting self acceptance just shy of my 47th birthday (June ‘22) was, as my new young friends have taught me to say, a mood. I’m incredibly grateful to be a part of a small unhinged survival clique and to have made inroads into multiple Portland trans communities — but I find people my age or older and rare, and even when I do I find them our histories are very different.
Sante and I are twenty years apart. I can’t claim to be a part of her generation or her mine — but as I entered early young adulthood I went looking for a way to live outside the system and saw, and remain intrigued by, the faint ruins of the New York City bohemia she describes. By my time its best days were behind it. Instead I found myself drawn to the West Coast and the last days of a different sort of bohemia in Portland.
I Heard Her Call My Name’s transition story covers the usual beats with a few wrinkles, all captured by a writer and thinker with a finely honed craft and, for the first time, her own story to tell. Where it stands out for me is the distillation of what it means to try and build a life when you have a certain sort of undiagnosed/untreated gender dysphoria in an era that barely had gay people present in the culture, much less trans folks.
The way it can make everything so much more difficult, and how embracing transition finally gives us enough air to breathe. Air that was in short supply in the weird interregnum between gay liberation and the modern trans rights movement and post-tipping-point cultural moment.
Lucy ends her book just shy of 18 months on hormones, and I smile to be finishing the book a few days after my own year and a half HRT anniversary. I’m still longing to find women of my age and experience and I Heard Her Call My Name has reminded me that we’re out there, and more and more of us are choosing to truly live.