This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley.

Who am I?

Is a question writer Lucy Saunt

has been asking herself for the better part of her life.

As she writes in a new book titled,

I heard her call my name, a memoir of Transition.

Saunt describes how she found herself in the unlikeliest of places in 2021

through a gender swapping feature on Face App, which allowed her to turn pictures of herself

as a man into a woman.

Throughout her life, she says, changing genders was a strange and electric idea that lived somewhere in the recesses of her mind

for the better part of 67 years.

Lucy Sont, who was a signed male at birth, is known for her incisive criticism and cultural commentary for the New York

review of books. She's also written nine books that explore subcultures in

urban history including low life, lures and snares of old New York.

Evidence, a collection of rarely seen New York Police Department

evidence photographs taken in the 1900s,

and the other Paris, a look the French capital's underbelly.

Sont recently retired from Bard College

where she had been a visiting professor of photography and writing for over two decades.

Lucy Sont, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you, Tanya. Glad to be here.

Can I have you take us to February of 2021 when you wrote to around 30 of your closest friends in an email with a

subject line that read a bombshell can I have you read the first page of that letter

...