Adult Human Male

by Oliver Radclyffe

Overview

"This is not queer theory. This is my flesh and blood," writes Oliver Radclyffe in this spirited polemic on trans identity. Presenting his careful logic with lyrical prose, Radclyffe disrupts -- intentionally, pointedly, playfully -- the current structure of popular debates on gender.

With Adult Human Male, he rejects the academic argot of theoretical constructs and, instead, recenters the trans body as fundamental to a humanist inquiry into identity. Radclyffe posits that the cis perspective -- from which nearly all gender discussions begin -- is anything but neutral and thus demands both interrogation and expansion so that trans identity is not viewed through a hostile lens.

Adult Human Male marks an important advance in how to understand, discuss, and respect the trans experience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798990614147
Publisher:	Unbound Edition Press
Publication date:	09/30/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	90
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

The only daughter of an upper-class English family, Oliver Radclyffe tried to follow all the rules: attending boarding school, earning a university degree, marrying a suitable man, giving birth to four children, and moving to the Connecticut suburbs. Then, he realized that he was not a heterosexual woman - nor actually a woman at all. Oliver is part of a new wave of transgender writers unafraid to address the complex nuances of transition, examining how gender identity, sexual orientation, feminist allegiance, social class, and family history overlap. His work has appeared in The New York Times and Electric Literature.

Editorial Reviews

2023-11-27
A trans author presents a discussion about being trans in a cis world.

Anyone can be trans, from entertainers to cashiers to members of one’s family, notes Radclyffe. Why, then, he asks, has discourse around this topic “become a pinball machine” in which trans people are the ball, ricocheting against the walls? Radclyffe asserts that it’s partly a matter of perspective. Some voices are simply louder, he notes—journalism, politics, and religion are largely cisgender domains. Using his own personal experience, wit, and enthusiasm, the author guides his readers to viewpoints that may be new to them. On the subject of trans kids competing in sports, he invites readers into the mind of a child on a soccer team. The child has body dysmorphia but is happy and at peace with her teammates. To ban her from playing, the author says, means only considering the feelings of cis people who feel threatened. At another point, the author explains that he didn’t transition from one sex to another, but “changed my body to become itself.” Overall, Radclyffe presents an empathetic and insistent work that effectively brings clarity to several topics for people who might lack it. For example, he uses an analogy of sheep in pens to illustrate a “binary world, where the two sexes are separated off from each other. There is no migration, there are no gates between the fields, and the fences never move.” He points out that such thinking is limiting (“Why can’t we just have full run of the countryside?”) and driven by misogyny, and he clearly expresses his belief that all feminists should embrace trans rights, because the “mythical hierarchy of female weakness / inferiority and male strength / superiority can only exist if the two sexes remain separate.” He also notes the many gender identities to choose from beyond the binary male/female option (Radclyffe posits that there are between 72 and 93). In addition, the book contextualizes such often-misunderstood topics as gender therapy and gender-affirming surgery.

A brief but powerful and affecting book on the struggles of the trans community.

Kirkus Reviews