Current:Home > NewsPoinbank:A gender-swapping photo app helped Lucy Sante come out as trans at age 67 -EverVision Finance
Poinbank:A gender-swapping photo app helped Lucy Sante come out as trans at age 67
Indexbit Exchange View
Date:2025-04-10 23:28:20
Writer Lucy Sante has been asking herself "Who am I?Poinbank" for the better part of her life.
Sante, who was assigned male at birth, says changing genders was a strange and electric idea that lived in the recesses of her mind for years. Then, in 2021, she was playing around with a gender-swapping feature on a face-altering app and she had a breakthrough.
"It was uncanny, ... irrefutable," she says of seeing herself as a woman on the app. "I had no choice — I came out to my shrink 10 days later."
Sante is known for her incisive criticism and cultural commentary for The New York Review of Books. In her new memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name, she writes about coming out as a transgender woman at the age of 67.
Sante says her transition came after decades of avoidance. In the 1980s and 1990s, she worked a block away from Tompkins Square Park, a hub of the New York City trans scene and host of Wigstock, an annual drag festival.
"I could hear the [Wigstock] festivities from my office, but I'd wait until everybody had gone home before I'd slink back up the side of the park to my apartment," she says.
Sante says she yearned for somebody to come along and pull her into the Tompkins Square Park scene — but she was also "terrified" at the possibility: "This was the kind of internal war that raged in me for decades."
When she did finally come out to her friends in 2021, Sante says some were taken aback, but "generally everybody was cool." Since her transition, Sante says she can feel the tensions in some of her friendships relax.
"I'm just better at talking to people now because I'm not hiding anything," she says. "I was inhibited from real intimacy with really anybody because at any moment I could blab the wrong thing. ... It just haunted me for all these decades. So I think I'm probably a better friend with all of my friends than I was here before this."
Interview highlights
On coming out to her wife and son
I knew that my romantic relationship would not survive this. We're still best friends, but I knew that the romance part was not going to survive. ...
[My son] was totally chill. Because he's Gen Z. My son is now 24. He is, as I'm fond of saying, straight as a highway in Texas. But he's known trans kids since he was 11. ... He did LARPing — live action role playing — which really brings out the trans kids. He didn't bat an eyelash.
On worrying about changing her name
Why would I think that this would present any kind of difference in my career? ... My last name is rare and I'm only changing one letter. But the fact is that that was a kind of cover for a deeper existential reckoning with myself. ... I guess there's always been a kind of unstable relation between my inner self and what I show the world. Rather than changing my gender, per se, was changing my name that set off this weird kind of existential freefall. Like, who am I? This bizarre uncertainty that manifested as this completely ridiculous fear.
On her 1998 memoir, The Factory of Facts, in which she avoided personal reflection
I was dodging self depiction. And it's clear to me now, and it's a weakness of the book. And the fact is that I've recently realized, from writing this book, in which most of my close friends make appearances, I'd never really been able to write about people before because somehow there was a chain of constraints, beginning with the fact that I was trying to hide the secret. ... So everything I wrote was nicely written, deeply researched ... but it lacked that personal quality because I was unready to face who I was. I told myself regularly how I was being a hypocrite. ... The interesting thing is that since I've transitioned, I become brutally honest. I can't lie anymore. And I tend to speak my mind sometimes a little too loudly, and indecorously. I was painfully aware of that that gap, the between intention and actual result, and it's really set me free as a writer as well now.
On loneliness and happiness existing simultaneously
Transitioning has shown me whole new landscapes of loneliness that I didn't even know existed. I'm a love junkie. Always have been, and I suffer from withdrawal when I don't have it. But also, I don't know very many trans women. ... Sometimes when the mood is wrong, I can feel like I'm living on my own separate planet or far away from anyone else. There's a whole series of paradoxes here, and one of them is the fact that while I'm extremely lonely much of the time, I'm also much happier than I've ever been.
Sam Briger and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
veryGood! (38)
Related
- 'We're reborn!' Gazans express joy at returning home to north
- The company planning a successor to Concorde makes its first supersonic test
- Warm inflation data keep S&P 500, Dow, Nasdaq under wraps before Fed meeting next week
- B.A. Parker is learning the banjo
- Tarte Shape Tape Concealer Sells Once Every 4 Seconds: Get 50% Off Before It's Gone
- Average rate on 30
- Don't let hackers fool you with a 'scam
- Warm inflation data keep S&P 500, Dow, Nasdaq under wraps before Fed meeting next week
- What to watch: O Jolie night
- Alex Murdaugh’s murder appeal cites biased clerk and prejudicial evidence
Ranking
- At site of suspected mass killings, Syrians recall horrors, hope for answers
- Israel lets Palestinians go back to northern Gaza for first time in over a year as cease
- Charges tied to China weigh on GM in Q4, but profit and revenue top expectations
- Meet first time Grammy nominee Charley Crockett
- Biden administration makes final diplomatic push for stability across a turbulent Mideast
- Have Dry, Sensitive Skin? You Need To Add These Gentle Skincare Products to Your Routine
- Former Danish minister for Greenland discusses Trump's push to acquire island
- Appeals court scraps Nasdaq boardroom diversity rules in latest DEI setback
Recommendation
$73.5M beach replenishment project starts in January at Jersey Shore
'Squid Game' without subtitles? Duolingo, Netflix encourage fans to learn Korean
Backstage at New York's Jingle Ball with Jimmy Fallon, 'Queer Eye' and Meghan Trainor
2 killed, 3 injured in shooting at makeshift club in Houston
McKinsey to pay $650 million after advising opioid maker on how to 'turbocharge' sales
Why members of two of EPA's influential science advisory committees were let go
Grammy nominee Teddy Swims on love, growth and embracing change
See you latte: Starbucks plans to cut 30% of its menu