Originally published on the LA Review of Books 10/27/24.
LAST YEAR, I met Oliver Radclyffe when we were both speaking at the Provincetown Book Festival. Radclyffe was there to discuss his first book, Adult Human Male (2023). A slim volume of autotheory derived from Radclyffe’s experience of coming out as a transgender man in middle age, Adult Human Male provocatively argues that labeling Radclyffe’s medical experience as “transitioning” was a dangerous misnomer that actually made it more difficult for him to understand his own gender.
I assumed Radclyffe had to be an academic, and that his ability to break down intricate arguments for a general audience was born out of extensive experience publishing on queer topics. So, I was doubly surprised when I discovered he wasn’t a professor, and that Adult Human Male was his first book—sort of.
In actuality, he told me, Adult Human Male was in some senses both his first and second book: a distillation of all the things he had learned while trying to write a memoir about coming out as a lesbian later in life. The more he worked on that book, however, the more something seemed off—about how he thought about his gender, but more than that, about how the world thought about gender. So Radclyffe put that initial memoir aside and sat down to capture his evolving thoughts about gender into a manuscript that became Adult Human Male. Through the writing process, Radclyffe realized he was transgender, a perspective-shifting discovery that enabled him to finish the earlier memoir. That book, Frighten the Horses, was released in September to great acclaim, published through Roxane Gay’s imprint at Grove Atlantic. Humorous and heartwarming, Frighten the Horses covers Radclyffe’s two late in life coming out experiences, a story that unfurls in the wake of his moving from London to the Connecticut suburbs and raising four children–all while trying to figure himself out.
I sat down with Radclyffe to discuss the relationship between writing a memoir and living an authentic life, how he sees the relationship between Adult Human Male and Frighten the Horses, and his fascinating assertion that we’re thinking about gender “transition” completely wrong. Our conversation, which stretched out over an hour (and several follow-up emails), has been edited for clarity and length.
HUGH RYAN: We met while you were on tour for your first book, Adult Human Male—a fantastic work of autotheory that has a funny relationship to your new memoir, Frighten the Horses. Can you tell me about how the two books are related, and why Frighten the Horses came second?
OLIVER RADCLYFFE: The two books came as a team—I was writing in two different ways about the same experience. I had been writing Frighten the Horses for 10 years, and originally it was about me coming out as a lesbian. But the more I learned how to write memoir, the more I realized that what I was writing was very surface.
As I started writing on a deeper level, I was no longer able to stay in denial that I was trans. For the first 48 years of my life, everybody was like, “No, your body looks right. We’re all good.” And I’m like, “No, my body’s wrong.” Now, I consider myself to have a male body that had female deviations that needed to be corrected. Once that was changed, I was like, “Ah, that’s it. I’m good, I’m done, I’m happy, I’m me. This is exactly how I’m supposed to look.” I started transitioning in 2017, and every single day I still get pleasure looking at my body. Because for 48 or 49 years of my life, I was getting out of bed every day and looking at myself and going, “Something is horribly wrong.”
After I transitioned, I rewrote that old manuscript completely. I wanted the new version to be the experience of unearthing my transness, my own understanding of how that identity manifested in me. It wasn’t theoretical. It was a deeply somatic and embodied experience. So that’s how I wrote Frighten the Horses.
And Adult Human Male?
Well, while writing, I didn’t read any of the trans literature that was out there, because I didn’t want my ideas diluted by other people’s thoughts. Once I’d finished, I read all the trans literature I could get my hands on, whether it was academic, memoir, essays, or whatever. I wanted to add my voice to that conversation. While my memoir was out on submission, I started writing Adult Human Male, which I considered to be a more directly political book, because I was speaking directly to the conversations in the media and in the general population around me. Adult Human Male became this kind of CliffsNotes, holding my analytical and academic thoughts about my transition experience. I didn’t want to include those in the memoir, because I knew they would be at odds with this incredibly intimate, personal experience.
Do you see these books as having two different audiences?
Frighten the Horses has a wider audience, because I wrote it in such a way that if you knew nothing about gender identity, it would hold its value all on its own. Adult Human Male was written as my contribution to that conversation from a more expressly political perspective, so its audience is people who are already interested in that conversation and who have questions I believe I can answer.
Since I started writing the new version of Frighten the Horses in 2017, there have been more and more trans books published—which is exactly what we’ve all been hoping for, because these experiences are so varied that there’s no way one book could cover them all. There’s no one way to be transgender—something all transgender people know already, but which the general population often doesn’t because they’ve always been fed one narrative. Frighten the Horses adds my voice to that canon, as someone who came out much later in life.
Let’s talk about that—what you came to realize about trans identity through writing these two books, because you’re articulating a perspective that I think can really help people grappling with what gender means today. What’s the problem with our ideas about “gender transition?
Transition has traditionally been understood as somebody trying to align their “sex” with their “gender”—“gender” being our internal identity and “sex” being the external body. So, somebody like me, a trans man, I’m supposedly aligning my body with my internal gender, which is male.
But that’s not how the experience felt. I didn’t have this overwhelming sense that I had a male identity; what I had was an overwhelming sense that my body was wrong. But because I had been told I had to have this concrete, unchanging, persistent feeling that my gender was male—which I didn’t have—it took me a really long time to understand that I was trans.
During the writing of Frighten the Horses, I had to go really deep into what exactly I was feeling, which was that I needed to align my body with what my body needs itself to be, which is male. I took the idea of gender identity out of that equation completely, because I found it confusing, because identity doesn’t feel like it has a gender at all. My identity, if anything, feels neutral or genderless, or what we commonly call nonbinary. But when I aligned my body to fit with what I would term a nonbinary gender identity, it didn’t feel right. My brain kept telling me, my gut kept telling me, my body kept telling me that my body needed to be as male as I could get using surgery and hormones. And once I started to understand that and I started to pursue that path, I started to feel like a human being, and all of the dysphoria disappeared, all of the anxiety disappeared, all of this feeling that something was constantly wrong just vanished.
This reminds me of what you said a moment ago, about the importance of having more books, more voices of trans people in these conversations about sex and gender. Because what you’re saying here reminds me of Jennie June, a trans woman who published her autobiography in the early 1900s, and whose writing makes similar arguments.
Yes! That’s why I get so ridiculously excited about trans literature. When I finally started reading it, I was like, “Oh my god, we’re all saying the same thing.” All of us trans writers were writing variations on a theme, which is [that] there was a misunderstanding about what this experience is, and a lot of it is based on the language we’ve created around it. A lot of that language was not created by trans people. It was created by cis doctors who were trying to label and name what they thought trans people were going through, from the outside. Cis doctors saw “a woman change into a man,” so they called it “transitioning.” But that man was never a woman in the first place. They didn’t change from a woman into man. They simply aligned their body with what their body was supposed to look like.
When people ask me if I’m hopeful for the future of trans and nonbinary people, my answer is yes, absolutely, because we are in the middle of a huge awakening. Information is getting out there, books are being published, people are being highlighted—despite the backlash. And once it gets out there, it stays out there. Cis people are beginning to learn from us, not just about us.