From I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, which was published this month by Penguin Press.

For months I was preoccupied with the matter of my name. I knew perfectly well that my name was Lucy. Over the decades I had occasionally toyed with alternate names. I liked Louise, Betty, Julie, Colette, Simone, Florence; I thought of just dropping my first name in favor of my middle name, Marie. But Lucy stuck. That had nothing to do with any other Lucys I had met, but went straight back to my appearance as Lucy in a picture-caption…