"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.
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.
"In Adult Human Male, Oliver Radclyffe answers any question you could ever think of to explain what it feels like to be trans in every sense – bodily, politically, socially – and then some, giving us insight into a future where gender is more flexible than two categories... He does so plainly, with a dry humor and a gentle but firm hand that refuses to cede an inch of ground when it comes to the sovereignty of trans bodies and trans lives… Radclyffe's even tone and occasional simmering rage [reminds me] that I, fluid and undefined, am sane… His monograph is a moment of literary calm amid the wild seas of our current political and cultural landscape." - Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen
"Oliver Radclyffe's Adult Human Male is an excoriating response to what he calls the hostile cis perspective — the lie that there are no trans people, just broken cisgender people... But it is more: Interweaving his own story with the political, he makes the fight personal by letting us know him. After Adult Human Male, we cannot be neutral — anyone reading it can say they know a trans man and can put a face to the headlines. He writes with deft prose and measured fury, centering himself, his body, as the real thing being attacked in this fight… In Radclyffe's hands, transness becomes intimate and undeniably real." - Alexander Cheves
"Transness queers everything, which is why so many people are so frightened by it. Oliver Radclyffe has described his own growth and change, and how it felt from the inside. In doing, so he has predicted a future in which gender is not just mutable, but trivial. I can't wait to live in that world, and I love Oliver for forging the path." - Janet W. Hardy
