Luc, or is it Lucy Sante

Luc or is it Lucy Sante is a Belgian writer. Normally he chronicles urban life in New York City and other parts of America.

Now he has set out on something of a crusade. In the pages of Vanity Fair, of all magazines, he has chosen to open up about becoming a woman. By his dim reasoning he had always wanted to be a woman, but now at age 67, he has transitioned, and is now poisoning his body with hormone treatments. Taking opposite sex hormones is bad for your health.

In truth, we do not care about Luc or is it Lucy Sante. We do not want to be cruel. We do care about his and the magazine’s effort to persuade young people to transition before they reach senescence. Yesterday, a mother in California sued two of her child’s schoolteachers for trying to brainwash an 11 year old into thinking, first, that she is bisexual and second that she is really a boy.

We are happy that the mother brought the suit, and we emphasize that a society that routinely rationalizes child mutilation is doomed. 

Sante, whose name is French for health, discovered the joys of changing sexes by using a computer app. It shows his life as a girl. And it shows a desire fulfilled.

Changing genders was a strange and electric idea that had lived somewhere in the recesses of my mind for the better part of my 67 years. But I had seldom allowed myself such a graphic self-depiction; over the years I had occasionally drawn pictures and altered photographs to visualize myself as a woman but had always immediately destroyed the results. And yet I didn’t delete that cyber-image. Instead, over the next week or so I hunted down and fed in every image of myself I possessed, beginning at about age 12: snapshots, ID card pictures, studio portraits, book jacket photos, social media pictures. The effect was seismic. I could now see, laid out before me on my screen, the panorama of my life as a girl, from giggling preteen to last year’s matron. I had always hated seeing pictures of myself, but these made every kind of sense. My desire to live as a woman, I could now see, was a coherent phenomenon, consistently just under the surface of my nominal life for all those decades, despite my best efforts to pretend it wasn’t there.

Note that it is a question of fulfilling a desire. Forget about reality; forget about genetic makeup. Desire uber alles-- that is the slogan for what he has done. If you want to be something  you should be it, even if reality militates against it. In truth, Sante has not become a woman. He has become a simulacrum of a woman. I defy anyone to look at his picture and conclude that he is a woman.

Naturally, there is a therapy aspect of the problem. Sante’s transition follows upon some forty years of therapy. I introduce this paragraph in order to show what you can learn from forty years of therapy. Sante is surely someone who has had too much therapy.

We note in the ensuing paragraph that his new therapist was all-in with his notion that he should fulfill his desire. We note that he had been seeing her for four or five years and had not brought up the issue. Doesn't this suggest that his desire for femaledom is not quite as strong as he pretends? Doesn't it seem that he is self-aggrandizing by latching on to a fad.

Trembling but resolute, I told Dr. G at our weekly Zoom session that I had always wanted to be a woman and now felt it urgent that I take the necessary steps. Dr. G had consistently maintained an imperturbable nothing-human-is-alien-to-me equanimity, but I was nevertheless stunned by her quick and unsurprised assent. “It makes sense,” she told me. “It sounds like a good idea.” In the four or five years I’d been seeing her, I had never broached any mention of gender. My inner omertà relegated all such thoughts to the deepest, darkest corners, guarded by dragons. I’d seen therapists for nearly 40 years by then, but only one previous practitioner had ever come close to breaking the silence. Around 1991, Dr. P got me to admit that I had tried on my mother’s dresses and undergarments in early adolescence, although we never got a chance to explore the ramifications. Not long after I made that admission, Dr. P died of a massive heart attack 20 minutes after I left his office. My relationships with therapists had been checkered before and after—one tried to convert me to New Age spirituality; one spent most sessions talking about herself; one admitted that her expertise was in child psychology—and I never fully trusted another until I began seeing Dr. G.

So, that is what therapy has offered one Luc or is it Lucy Sante. One does not know what to make of the fact that Dr. P-- I can guess who it is but will refrain-- had a heart attack after hearing about Sante’s cross dressing, but obviously Sante would have done better to keep it all to himself. Does Sante believe that he killed his therapist with some remarks about cross dressing?

Why would he or the editors of Vanity Fair think it was a good idea to encourage children to transition, to engage in biochemical mutilation by taking puberty blockers or even to suffer surgical mutilation in order to pretend to be something they are not?