Our conversations about how the “transition memoir” is treated in our culture, how they usually follow a formulaic structure, and how they are often only privy to the light of day when the person writing it is already famous aren’t, at this point, close to a resolution of any kind. And yet, the need for trans storytelling, whether in fiction or through first-person accounts, remains as imperative as ever. The backlash against trans people in recent years has no doubt left many of us feeling as if there will never be relief from the constant antagonism and legislative damnation. Books can’t necessarily change the way our society is operating, but at the very least, they can give us a new way to look at and govern our own lives. Stories can help us break through some of that misery and help us resolve to keep fighting and living forward, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes look to them for that. But like many other trans critics, I’ve also grown a little weary of the way the “transition memoir” is thought of in our culture — as something that is “progressive” simply because it exists and as something that doesn’t need to say or do anything aside from participate in the three-act trans bildungsroman we’ve come to expect from these kinds of stories.
To me, the best kinds of trans memoirs do more than this. Of course, the tragedies and joys of pre- and post-transition life are still there, but so is everything else: who they are beyond transition, what their worlds are like, and the questions and themes that rule their existence outside of this one aspect of their lives. Although Oliver Radclyffe’s new memoir Frighten the Horses does follow some of that structure we’ve become accustomed to seeing in the genre, his storytelling provides us with something surprising, even radically refreshing when I think about the genre as a whole. Unlike a lot of the most popular transition narratives floating around in our cultural consciousness, Radclyffe’s story takes a different shape, one where the pains of becoming actually help him grow closer to the most important people in his life.
Radclyffe’s story begins on a Sunday in 2011. Radclyffe — then a perfectly coiffed 40-year-old Connecticut housewife — his husband, and their four young children are having breakfast at the diner they always go to near the edge of the town where they live. Radclyffe’s husband busied himself reading the newspaper while Radclyffe watched over the children, who couldn’t help but squirm and play in and out of their seats. As Radclyffe tells it, this was not an unusual occurrence for the family on a Sunday morning. Only, this Sunday was different from all of the others. On this particular day, a motorcycle rally was roaring its way through the streets of the town, and as Radclyffe watched the rally with his children, he was immediately brought back to what he knew before getting married and having children. He tells us about his time as the only “token female” of a small biker gang a little later, but in this moment watching the rally, he’s transfixed by how much he misses his life as a biker and by the feelings about himself that the rally brings to the surface. He writes, “I sank deeper into the dream until it almost felt like a memory, the outside world disintegrating, the pieces of my life spinning in circles around me until I wasn’t riding a motorcycle anymore, I was falling through the air. For a moment I panicked — my life flashing before my eyes — until I realized that I wasn’t falling, I was floating, and as the world came back into focus, I could see exactly who I was: a man on a motorbike, in love with a woman.”
After the rally, Radclyffe’s life is turned upside down even though it already was…in a way. Radclyffe had been dealing with escalating health issues for over a year — his limbs were sore and fatigued, his hair was falling out, and he was losing weight rapidly. After tests and consultations, his doctor concluded there was nothing actually wrong with him and suggested that, perhaps, these were bodily manifestations of some kind of mental stress. But Radclyffe kept shoving these potentialities aside until the rally finally broke him open and forced him to face the reality that he was attracted to women and not men. His issues with his gender, which he spent all of his life in denial about, weren’t even on the radar for him at the point. From there, we learn about Radclyffe’s early life growing up privileged in the English countryside where no one talked about queerness (let alone trans identities of any sort), his time crushing on girls at his English boarding schools, his experiences trying to run away from his family’s wealthy background through small acts of rebellion that eventually led to serious substance abuse, and the beginning of his relationship with his husband, the births of their four children, and their move to the U.S.
Interwoven with the narratives of his earlier life are well-detailed, sometimes heartbreaking, and often subtly humorous descriptions of coming out as a lesbian, catching himself up with the politics of queer identity, learning what it means to be trans and nonbinary, and trying to navigate his new life as a queer person then a trans person while also staying the primary caregiver for his four children, divorcing his husband, and finding, then losing, real love for the very time in his life. As he traverses through all of the new territory he barely even knew existed, he’s faced with constantly coming out — to his closest friends, to his husband, to his children, to the people in the upper-class Connecticut town where he lives, and, most crucially, to his parents, whose love and support for Radclyffe seemed endless in its depth and intensity. While his story isn’t free from the pain of loss or the difficulties of coming out as queer and trans in his middle age, he’s shown over and over the care and generosity of the majority of the people he loves. And in turn, he takes care to return it to them as best he can.
Radclyffe’s writing is full of cringe-worthy admissions that are striking in both their content and in Radclyffe’s willingness to share them with his readers. The more Radclyffe learns about queer and trans life — or even what some might feel are “basic” feminist beliefs — the more he realizes how detached from the things that might make him question who he is he’s been his whole life. All of his perceptions about queer life, about gay men and lesbians, and about gender itself get upended and annihilated one by one. Throughout the telling of his story, he doesn’t shy away from showing us how his thinking is completely restructured. In a moment in our culture where people are so quick to hide or deny these details about their past selves, Radclyffe’s honesty and vulnerability in these particular moments helps show that the process of becoming isn’t limited to what we learn about our own inner lives and desires. It’s also about what we’ve refused to see by denying ourselves for so long.
While this is enough to set Frighten the Horses apart, Radclyffe’s reflections on parenthood — and on the gendered and non-gendered dimensions of motherhood, especially — help bring his work to another level entirely. Like any great parent might, he writes anxiously and urgently about his fears of screwing his kids up by finally figuring out who he is and changing their lives entirely. He worries when they’re concerned about telling their friends and other people they know about Oliver’s life and the fact that he’s trans. And beyond that, he writes openly and candidly about loving parenthood and doesn’t act as if it’s a roadblock he must blow up on his journey to becoming. When someone questions him as he’s celebrating his first Mother’s Day as a trans man, he writes, “Just because I was trans didn’t mean I was any less of a mother, did it? I’d survived three pregnancies, nearly fifty hours of labor, a torn vagina, and a near-fatal hemorrhage. I’d pushed four children out of my birth canal — two of them within three minutes of each other — and then spent the next thirteen years single-handedly tending to their physical, spiritual, educational, and emotional needs. Nobody was going to tell me I wasn’t a mother.”
Towards the end of the memoir, when he’s post-top surgery and a few months on testosterone finally feeling like the man he wants to be, he describes a conversation he had with one of his sons about gender. He realizes that he hadn’t actually “harmed” his children as he worried he had and that his children were actually one of the most important reasons for becoming exactly who he was meant to be in the first place:
The world had tried to tell me that I couldn’t care for myself and also for my children, that I couldn’t be trans and queer and be a source of stability, that unless I was in a committed, long-term, monogamous relationship I could provide them with the love and support they needed, but I no longer believed any of this. I didn’t know who or what my children would become, but whatever my failings as a parent — and I knew there had been many — my children would walk out into the world armed with all the tools I’d once lacked: courage, curiosity, the confidence to form their own opinions and trust their own instincts. They’d already learned that life wouldn’t always be easy, so they wouldn’t be blindsided when things went wrong. They’d be able to change direction when a path they chose led to a dead end, and they’d know how to stand up for themselves — for who they were and what they believed in — wherever their lives ended up taking them. […] They needed me and were embarrassed by me and blamed me for everything and frequently told me they hated me, and I wanted every part of it. […] Everything I had, everything I’d done, everything I’d become, I owed to them.
The memoir closes back at the diner that kickstarted Radclyffe’s journey, sitting with a close trans friend of his and all of his children, now teenaged and almost-teenaged, hearing from them that he really didn’t “fuck them up” that badly. Actually, he hadn’t really “fucked them up” at all — they love him, and they want to keep supporting him in any way they can. Most of what Radclyffe thought he’d lose by choosing himself and following his deepest needs for the first time in his life actually survived the “blast” he felt he detonated by coming out. It’s not an ending every queer and trans person gets when they finally step into who they are, especially when they’re older and more situated into their lives, but Radclyffe’s story proves it’s possible, even in situations where it’s least expected. And maybe that can help will these kinds of happy endings into fruition more often.
Frighten the Horses by Oliver Radclyffe is out now.
