In the 1960s, as American and European doctors helped people transition — often older individuals with families of their own — they were dogged by the question of how to know who was truly, in the language of the day, “transsexual.” As stef m. shuster writes in the academic history “Trans Medicine,” doctors sometimes viewed their willingness to risk losing those families as a “litmus test” of credibility. Loss and pain became the metric of who was truly trans.
Though history goes unaddressed in “Frighten the Horses,” Oliver Radclyffe’s new memoir of midlife transition, this context is a specter that haunts his life. Who and what will he have to lose to become who he is?
When the story opens, on a Sunday in 2011, Radclyffe — whose previous book, “Adult Human Male,” approached the subject of his transition from a more theoretical, polemical position — presents as a perfectly coifed, 40-year-old mother of four, sitting in the corner booth of a diner with his family, waiting to watch a motorcycle rally drive by. But as his husband, Charles, reads the Financial Times and their children play over a table of abandoned pancakes, Radclyffe is startled by a moment of queer identification. A former biker, he suddenly realizes that “I was meant to be out there among them,” riding his own motorcycle with “the featherweight figure of a woman’s body behind me.”
Beneath such maddeningly retrograde (and sexist) conceptions of womanhood and gender is a much-needed book about later-in-life transition, at once enjoyable to read and well-written on the sentence level.
After a year of unexplained physical symptoms ranging from shooting pains in his legs and hands to insomnia, weight loss and hair loss, Radclyffe learns from a doctor that the body sometimes “creates pain as a defense mechanism against unconscious mental stress.” When he first comes out, he can only articulate his attraction to women. Charles “threatened to destroy me”; he demands that Radclyffe “hide it.” For the author, gender “wasn’t something I was interested in looking at just yet.”
But as years go by, as his marriage crumbles and he begins dating women and stepping into his masculinity, his gender identity becomes harder to ignore. When he comes out as trans six years later, the revelation sits uneasily with his loved ones. His 13-year-old son, who encounters transphobia online, puts the conflict succinctly: “I do want you to be happy, I just also want you to be my mom.” A lesbian partner tells him, “I can’t be held accountable if you become something I can’t love.”
Radclyffe writes movingly about parenting and the emotional risks of every step he takes toward affirming his maleness .Purchasing a prosthetic penis off a shelf feels “like finding something I’d lost, something familiar for which I’d once felt great affection,” he writes. “It was so absolutely my penis it seemed strange it wasn’t already attached to me.”
But given that this narrative begins in 2011 and not 1950, Radclyffe’s professed unawareness about queer existence can strain credulity. Raised in an “upper-class bubble of the English countryside,” he spent his adulthood in “an equally secluded life in Connecticut” where he was so busy raising children that “the growing visibility of the gay rights movement had completely passed me by.”
The book is riddled with jarring anachronisms about, for example, gay men being more “glamorous” than lesbians, and female bodies being wide-hipped and narrow-waisted where males ones are “hard and straight.” In Radclyffe’s Connecticut, ladies lunch, men earn the money and great care is taken not to “frighten the horses,” as the 1920s British actor Mrs. Patrick Campbell once said of keeping sex work out of public sight.
Still, as a testament to midlife transition — especially in a time when so much of the cultural conversation around gender rights focuses on young people — Radclyffe’s memoir offers a valuable alternate narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on.
The post A Midlife Transition Rattles a Suburban Family appeared first on New York Times.
