I HEARD HER CALL MY NAME

An award-winning writer chronicles her late-in-life gender transition.

This memoir charts Sante’s recent transition from male to female in her late 60s. Her commentary alternates between explaining the challenges of her decision and reflecting on earlier moments in a life marked by gender dysphoria. The author provides detailed and engaging descriptions of the process of transitioning, from choices about makeup, clothing, and drug therapies, to making connections with community support groups and handling the delicate protocols of coming out to friends and co-workers. Sante delivers sharply rendered sketches of bohemian New York, where the author has spent much of her life. At the beginning of the book, Sante describes how she experimented with FaceApp’s “gender‑swapping feature.” Looking at the digitally altered images—many of them included here—produced “one shock of recognition after another” and the sense that what she saw was “exactly who I would have been” at various stages of her life, from childhood to middle age. In tracking her own long-standing self-evasions, Sante offers perceptive commentary on the psychological dynamics that led her to delay the process of fully assuming a female identity. A poignant irony, sensitively explored over the course of the memoir, is that her writing career sought to expose important truths in the social communities she inhabited, especially among those with nonconformist lifestyles, while privately she denied a fundamental truth about herself. Also insightful is Sante’s broader societal analysis, which locates her struggles within a culture that seems to both covertly acknowledge and severely punish gender fluidity. The memoir concludes with a justifiable expression of hope that the author’s experiences might be instructive to those seeking to understand transition and the personal and social complexities it can pose.

An absorbing analysis of a long-standing search for identity in writing and life.