“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.

More from this author

How Elliot Page escaped womanhood

By Sarah Ditum

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…”

A lot of men’s writing about women has been ludicrously sexist, and in recognition of that fact, a great many male authors today — who come, on the whole, from the nice liberal side of the tracks, and would be alarmed at being cast as “anti woman”, especially in a heavily feminised publishing industry — have tended to stow their libidos. By contrast, the big filthy beasts of the 20th century look tawdry and dated: Philip Roth, John Updike, Martin Amis, standing awkwardly in the corner with their dicks in their hands. In the mid-to-late 20th century, their openness about desire was revelatory — part of the great post-war liberation. In the 21st century (and especially after #MeToo) they’re treated with more suspicion: less literary explorers of the libidinous underworld, more cringy self-pleasurers. The only heirs left to that literary tradition seem to be trans women writers, such as Sante or Torrey Peters, whose novel Detransition, Baby is a riot of sissy porn and flopping testicles. Perhaps the stigma about “breasting boobily” goes away when the male authors in question have grown their own.

Male desire can be a forbidding subject for women. Whether as a consequence of nature or nurture, men’s sexuality tends to be a more consuming presence in their lives than it is for women. In a bell curve distribution, there will be significant overlap — but men in general have higher sexer drives than women. Men also tend to have weirder sex drives than women: paraphilias, the fancy sexologist work for “kink”, are considerably more common in men than in women.

This is uncomfortable knowledge, and for women it can be nicer to ignore it.  For men, meanwhile, sustaining a “decent” life while suspecting yourself of being thoroughly indecent within can become intolerable. Sante writes often about the strain of repression. And the trans writer Debbie Hayton described managing autogynephilia as “like someone trying to hold down a beach ball underwater, only for it to force its way to the surface”. Alasdair Gray — author of Poor Things, and one of the greatest of all literary perverts — wrote that “unless we bring one of our wicked little dreams just a wee bit to life we live like zombies”.

Suggested reading

The tragedy of becoming a woman

By Sarah Ditum

Women, often, would simply rather not know about this aspect of men. It is disturbing, alien, disruptive. That perhaps explains why Sante’s woman colleague was able to skip past the “crotch” sentence and arrive at the comfortable conclusion that Sante was now “female”. It explains why many female readers of Detransition, Baby seemed to overlook the dirty bits and neuter it into being a novel about “womanhood”.

But it explains too why there was a response of unmitigated disgust from some women who recognised Detransition, Baby for the work of honest filth it is. When Peters was long-listed for the Women’s Prize in 2021, the objection from some gender critical campaigners was not only that it should have been ineligible by dint of Peters’ sex (a fair point), but also that its content made it illegitimate.

“Had a female author submitted a culturally regressive, sadomasochistic, misogynistic ‘surrendered wife’ narrative to the Women’s Prize, it would rightly have been ignored by the judges,” said one angry open letter to the Women’s Prize. Actually, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, with multiple scenes of sadomasochistic sex between its two protagonists, was long-listed in 2019, so this criticism doesn’t ring true. What was objectionable about Peters’ book was maybe that, unlike the melancholic Rooney novel, it appeared to be written by someone who was having a thoroughly good time getting mucky.

Yet men’s sexuality seems, on the whole, to be something women ought to be interested in. After all, almost all of us live with or alongside men. Some of us sleep with them too. The truth should be more valuable than the nice-guy mythology: knowing what a man wants entails no obligation to consent to it. To respond with disgusted calls for men to censor themselves — or worse, with the ladylike self-censorship of Butler — is to wilfully choose ignorance.

There’s a complication, though. Desires are not just inherent: they’re also imitative. Part of Sante’s journey to transition is the slow-burn of a lifetime of fantasy; part of it is the easy access to an online community that reinforces the wish. For most of Sante’s existence, “becoming a woman” was an impossible urge. Only when technology makes it tangible did it become a consuming obsession. There should be space in the world for the honest — and hopefully intelligent — disclosure of the male libido, as for the female. But it may be men who pay the highest price for that knowledge.

The postmaster, like the vicar and the publican, has historically created a kind of tapestry out of individual, sometimes rather lonely, human lives. Through the wonderful alchemy of community, it is capable of transforming them into something immeasurably more worthwhile. But in the first half of last year, pubs were closing at a rate of two a day. Churches are being shut down by the very people who are supposed to be keeping them open. In 2000, nearly a million people went to a Church of England service on a Sunday; by 2022, that figure fell to 549,000. And, as all of us have learned this January if we didn’t know already, for the past two decades the Post Office has been driving its own employees into the ground. 

The Church has become intertwined in this scandal in more than symbolic ways however, through the figure of Rev. Paula Vennells, first ordained as a deacon in 2005 and CEO of the Post Office from 2012 to 2019. She is now personally and nominally tied to one of our century’s great miscarriages of justice. And I imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury now rather regrets the foreword to his book Reimagining Britain: Foundations for Hope in which he credits Vennells with having “shaped my thinking over the years”. But this wasn’t just a rhetorical tribute: Vennells’s thinking has left its mark on more than one national institution. Across her careers, she has championed and centralised precisely the kind of centralising managerialism that leaves the little people forgotten. It is exactly this approach that Welby has galvanised as a battering ram against the local parish church throughout his tenure at Canterbury.

Despite the fact that Vennells had almost zero parish experience, never having been a vicar for instance, her candidacy for the post of Bishop of London — the third-most senior clerical job in the country — was supported by Welby. Astonishingly in retrospect, she came within a whisker of getting that job in 2017. This was at a time when Vennells’s star was riding high. She had turned a loss-making Post Office to profit. Perhaps she could do the same with the ailing Church of England, restoring both institutions to their position — alongside the Pub — in the holy trinity of British communal life. But, as we now know, not since Beeching has the local had such powerful enemies. 

More from this author

Justin Welby can't read the room

By Giles Fraser

Embarrassingly for me, many of us subscribed to Vennells’s ideas back then. In 2015, without recognising the irony, I wrote for the Guardian: “We must do to the churches what Beeching did to the railways.” Here are some lines from that sorry piece. “The Church of England is the custodian of 15,700 churches… I suspect that if every single one of them were blown up tomorrow, England would be a much more Christian country in 10 years’ time.” The idea was this: “Instead of one over-stretched vicar covering six of eight rural churches, we should copy the way in which England was first evangelised through the establishment of minsters – churches that are supported by a community of clergy, churches that have the scale to maintain good organists, choirs and Sunday Schools… These high-morale, better-resourced bundles of energy could then become local campaign headquarters for the re-evangelisation of England.” What we needed was some creative destruction. 

It was a ridiculous thing to believe and I regret saying it. Mea culpa. But others kept the faith, and practised what they preached. Leicester Diocese, for instance, describes their Minster Communities as “groups of churches and fresh expressions working collaboratively and sharing resources to enable effective mission”. In 2021, Leicester Diocese voted to close 234 parish churches and replace them with 20-25 Minster communities each led by an Operations Director — who may or (more likely) may not be a priest. Clergy numbers could be cut and thus savings achieved. 

What do these clergymen and women do all day, after all? In my own Guardian piece I described the Church of England as mired in nostalgia “for a parish pastoral in which the local vicar, who knows everyone, wanders around in some wheel of benevolent aimlessness”. But this was to besmirch a vital civic function. Exeter MP Ben Bradshaw has noticed the dire consequences of this Minster mentality over in the Diocese of Truro: “Parishes are losing their clergy and you’re getting these huge mega-parishes that are unmanageable.”

In 2019, Rev. Vennells was tasked by the Church of England to write a secret review of how all this new thinking was going, in a church governance and buildings report. And not longer after she’d apologised to the wronged sub-postmasters for the “distress” they had been caused, the Church Commissioners asked her to come and tell them about her findings. The report surfaced last week, and in it the scale of the central church’s attack upon the local is fully revealed. It speaks of 1,000 church closures over the country: “Manchester has closed more than anywhere and balances its books with closures. And Chichester – £1.5 million deficit and was able to take £1.5 from closed churches and pastoral account and again this year.”

One Bishop who spoke up for the local church and against mass church closures was castigated in Vennell’s report for an attitude displaying an unwillingness to face “the ‘burdens’ of truth”. In an Orwellian twist, the report suggested that such recalcitrant Bishops would benefit from a “peer review” — which is manager-speak for re-education. It advised they have a “‘leadership contract’ or covenant agreed by senior leaders aligned to shared leadership values and behaviours”. This is the kind of language by which managerialism clasps its bony hands around the throats of the church. 

More from this author

Has the Church stopped working?

By Giles Fraser

In the light of the Post Office scandal, there has been much understandable anger about Vennells personally, claims that she is somehow morally deficient and in it for the money. I don’t quite share this view. In a sense, I think it’s worse than that. What the shocking treatment of sub-postmasters has revealed is not so much a story of avarice but of unwarranted trust in systems — systems of management, systems of technology — over people. This is the 21st-century equivalent of the banality of evil. And now, 700 ordinary decent men and women have been accused and prosecuted for theft on the say-so of a system of data. Divorces followed, stress, illness, bankruptcy, in some cases suicide. Apparently they thought computer systems — unlike people — could never sin. 

Something incredibly beautiful has been broken, perhaps never again to be mended. I was a fool to think that the local parish church could be replaced by vicars in regional hubs, fired with start-up entrepreneurial energy but hiding behind their laptops. I wanted some quick fix to the church’s slow decline, but I helped to make it worse. Clergy were described as “limiting factors”, church buildings as expensive millstones. Out with the old in with the new. Move fast and break things, was the spirit of the age. The sad story of Rev. Vennells and the Post Office has the same roots: a hubristic faith in technology and progress. Tragically, we broke far more than we ever realised.