In February 2021, the writer Luc Sante was killing the lockdown dead-time by running pictures of himself through FaceApp, seeing what he might look like as a woman. The effect was powerful. Life-altering, in fact. In the app’s feminised image, Sante felt he was seeing his — her — true self, a female self. Lucy. Two weeks later, Sante came out as trans in an email circulated to 30 or so friends.
“When I saw her,” wrote Sante, referring to Lucy, “I felt something liquefy in the core of my body. I trembled from my shoulders to my crotch. I guessed that I had at last met my reckoning.” This was not a sudden whim for Sante, then aged 66, but a longstanding fixation made finally undeniable. As evidence, Sante included in the letter a list of recurrent “masturbation scenarios”, all of which involve coerced feminisation: “cast as a girl in the school play, then persuaded to go out on the town in costume; hired as an assistant by a wealthy society woman who amuses herself by dressing me up as a girl; new roommate assigned to me in college has been dressing as a girl for years and has a full wardrobe.”
Sante’s friends were uniformly warm and positive in response. One female colleague wrote back to say it was “exciting to have another great female writer”. Only one person replied critically — a trans woman, who told Sante: “My only note so far is that I wouldn’t mention your crotch in connection with a realisation about your gender identity, because any mention of genitalia or crotches instantly brings up all sorts of bizarre paranoid delusions that trans women are just transitioning as part of some kind of sexual fetish.”
Sante bridled a little at the judgement, given that this was a private letter to a small group, but changed the word “crotch” for “belly”. And then — this is the fascinating part — reverted to “crotch” for the least private possible audience, republishing the original letter in a new memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name. In fact, Sante seems entirely blithe about the crotch mentions, announcing near the end of the book that: “my dysphoria was never centred on or even especially concerned with genitalia. (Although it is extremely exciting to have tits.)” Bottom surgery is presumably not on the to-do list.
It hardly seems to require any “bizarre paranoid delusion” to see evidence of a fetish at work. But for Sante’s trans woman correspondent, the anxiety was presumably about saying the quiet part out loud. Since the start of this century, trans activism has pushed a “born this way” narrative of gender identity — and at the same time, aggressively rejected any implication that a man might have a sexual motivation for identifying as a woman.
This is despite the fact that we are supposedly in a more permissive era than ever before. “Kinkshaming” is the great taboo: it’s a worse faux pas to wrinkle your nose at someone else’s peccadillos than it is to flaunt your own. And yet this is also an era with a great intolerance of male displays of sexuality in culture. While the underworld of pornography propagates unchecked horrors, the oversexed male mainstream writer is a subject of open derision. There are few more crushing satires than the “men writing women” meme: “She breasted boobily to the stairs and titted downwards…”
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