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...