I really loved this. I’ve been so into memoirs by older trans and queer people, and this one is fantastic. Sante comes out and transitions when she’s 65ish, during the pandemic. She writes about how she’s always known she was a girl, always known she was trans, and denied it for most of her life for a whole slew of complex reasons.

Sante is so candid about why she found it hard to come out—because of where and when she grew up, because of her immigrant parents from Belgium and what she was and was not exposed to and simply what she could and couldn't imagine. How all the stories of trans people she saw seemed impossible. But she also talks about how she knew that transitioning would upend her life and cause all this turmoil. I think this is something that (cis) people maybe underestimate? Sante transitioned, and she writes about how glad she is that she did, but she also writes about hard and painful change can be, especially when that change comes with all this social stigma. It can be a really powerful force of inertia. 

I also was thinking a lot about queer timelines and trans timelines and normative timelines and how they intersect and don’t, when a queer timeline can cause violence and when it doesn’t. She talks about how of course she would have been happy if she could have come out earlier. She fantasizes about her girlhood even as she writes about some of the lovely aspects of coming out in her 60s. But what this made me think of is how it’s normative timelines that so often prevent queer timelines from happening. Like if you’re expected to grow up and get married and have kids, and somewhere in your brain you know you actually want to transition, maybe you repress that and just go through the steps of the timeline. Or maybe you’ve done all those things and get to a certain age in your life and you think, well, now I’m at the point on the timeline where there is no more change. So you don’t transition. 

I guess what I’m saying is I don’t want to say, "oh it’s so beautiful she transitioned in her 60s!" because that ignores the pain of her life. But I also don't want to say, "wow, what a tragedy that she waited until she was in her 60s!" because that is not the story she's telling, that's not honest either. I’m thinking about timelines because I think the mainstream timelines are this massive violence, and that applies to so many things. It applies to people who think trans kids can’t know who they are, because knowing who you are at 5 doesn’t fit the timeline. And it also applies to people who have gender or queer realizations later in life, because there is a right time to have those realizations, and it’s between ages 15-23 or so. There are all these expected beats that mainstream timelines require, and if we stray from those, we’re ridiculed, treated like less than adults, so there’s this huge incentive not to stray from them, and it causes so much pain. 

I’m thinking about what it would mean to discard all timelines, all social and relationship markers, all markers related to age about when you’re supposed to hit identity milestones. What freedom would we find then? 

Anyway, loved her brashness, her honesty, the way she writes about who she is and was, how she talks about how she came out in this letter and then got scared and almost sent another letter saying, "Nope I changed my mind!" I love how she talks about all the things she does that make her “bad." I really enjoyed her playfulness and fluidity and humor.