"Nothing that can happen now can compare to how awful it felt to be pre-transition." — Oliver Radclyffe

Happy Pride! Oliver Radclyffe joins the Being Alive Book Club to talk sex, transition, and parenting.

Happy Pride!

My teenage self would never have believed that I spent the last weekend in June quietly at home, writing, reading, and editing. And I couldn’t be happier about it.

It was a real pleasure to spend the last Saturday in June revisiting our Being Alive Book Club conversation with writer Oliver Radclyffe. I couldn’t figure out why I was avoiding editing this piece until I got towards the end and burst into tears thinking about everything trans and queer people sacrifice to just live. Oof.

I think you’ll find Oliver’s humor and charm jump off the page. I’d love to hear what speaks to you—drop in the comments or reply back to this in your inbox.

For those of you looking for community, we’re meeting tomorrow (Mon June 30) to light a candle for Marsha P. Johnson and discuss Tourmaline’s new biography. RSVP here. ❤️

Back in May, author Oliver Radclyffe joined the Being Alive Book Club to discuss his recent memoir, Frighten the Horses, a heart-opening story of his later-in-life transition. A Brit by birth, Oliver never aspired to be a Connecticut suburban mother of four—and then realized how very wrong that identity was. I’m a huge fan of Oliver’s writing and read his book the moment it released last fall. As much of an odd pairing as they might be, what spoke to me the most was how Oliver talked about his relationship to his body during sex and his approach to parenting his children.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Book club members are identified with their first initial.

Kyle: Let me start by reading your own words back at you (page 70): "There's only one way to find out how a trans person identifies. That's by asking them." So, Oliver, how do you identify?

Oliver: It depends who's asking. If a cishet person is asking, I'll say I'm a trans man. If a queer person is asking, I will say I am a gender irrelevant transsexual—in that my transition was really based in my body. I don't really believe that I have a gendered identity as such at all, so gender irrelevant transsexual seems to be the closest you can come. But long and short of it is, I'm a trans man.

Kyle: And as a parent—are you a dad? Are you a mom? Are you both?

Oliver: Definitely both. Officially, now I'm a dad, and everybody—well, the kids call me Oliver. They don't call me dad or mum.But, I refer to myself as a father when I'm talking to people. I feel it's the only feminine part of me that I still feel deeply rooted in my body. I still feel like a mother. I think that's partly because my body did give birth to four children, and because I identified the role of mothering with the word mother for so long that I almost feel like mothering is more a role than a gender anyway. So I do still identify to myself as a mother, if that makes sense. Everyone refers to me as a dad. I think I’m the only person who secretly still feels like a mother.

Because I think that feminine side of me really gets activated when I'm looking after my kids. I find with my kids, they call me Oliver, they refer to me as Dad, but if they're upset they'll call me Mom—because that's the part of me that they're trying to access.

Oliver treated us to a brief reading from the end of Chapter One—a perfect scene where another parent is bewildered by hearing one of his kids shout, “See ya later, Mom,” on his way out the door.

Kyle: How does it feel to read your work again now, half a year post-publication?

Oliver: I'm sort of almost tired of it and looking forward to moving on. I've read it so many times now. But I love hearing other people talk about it back to me, because every single person who comes back and tells me what they got out of it got something completely different. That's been more rewarding than I could possibly have imagined.

Kyle: Someone from the book club messaged me to say they thought your book could save lives.

Oliver: That would be absolutely delightful if it does anything helpful for anybody. I really wrote this for a cis audience originally. I live in the suburbs, I was brought up in an entirely cishet environment, and because I came out so late, a lot of my friends are still cisgender and heterosexual. I was writing this in 2015-2017, when a lot of cisgender people hadn't quite caught up with the whole trans conversation.

What surprised me is that a lot of trans people have come back and said “it's so amazing to feel so seen.” A lot of parents of trans kids have been really moved by it, too. I think that's because I'm not talking in millennial or Gen Z language—I'm talking in Gen X borderline boomer language.

Kyle: I don’t want to proclaim you as a conformist by any means, but there is a way that you are projecting a less threatening lifestyle. You are the suburban…

Oliver: I’m very, very vanilla. The most interesting thing I’ve ever done is transition. Other than that, I’m really quite dull. Very unthreatening.

Kyle: Well, I’m not going to call you vanilla. You are a bit of a Trojan horse. And you are very funny—and you know it. I had the pleasure of attending your book launch event with the legendary Kate Bornstein, and I wrote down in my notes that you said of yourself, “I’m naturally hilarious.”

Oliver: Sorry. That’s the English in me. This is what we do: we disguise vulnerability with humor. It’s sort of hard-baked into the DNA.

Kyle: I want to get to craft questions, but first, I emailed you to say that I wanted to focus on two things tonight: sex and parenting. A funny combination, perhaps. But for me, that is what resonated so deeply about your book. Your book was so much about sex and bodies, while also clearly showing your absolute devotion to your family.

You write with reverence about your parents; you are critical of how you grew up, yet you also embrace them in the present. You also wrote quite vulnerably about your body, what it felt like for you to have sex and feel your phantom penis. Which was harder to write about: the parenting or the body?

Oliver: That’s a tough question. Difficult in different ways. I knew I had to talk about my body in some detail because I understood that in order to transition. I had to have a gender that was not aligned to my body. I understood that sort of traditional binary version of transness: if I identified as trans, I should have a very specifically male gender that did not align with my female body.

But I didn't feel like my gender was male. I knew my gender had masculine qualities, but it also had feminine qualities and completely ungendered qualities. It didn't feel male enough for me to say I had to transition—it didn't feel definitive enough until I figured out that my gender dysphoria was all in my body. It was my body that was wrong.

I had a hideous discomfort with my body. All my life, I hadn’t been able to identify it because I didn’t have this very binary idea that my gender was male. The minute I started understanding my body as male, it was like, "Oh, it’s this!” The first time I discovered this was the first time I had sex with a woman. Prior to that, whenever I had sex, I just dissociated because the whole thing was completely wrong—partly because I was sleeping with the wrong sex, and partly because my body was the wrong sex. But the first time I slept with a woman, because she was the right sex for my sexual orientation, I kind of lost control of the inhibitions of my body, and at that moment I realized: “Holy fuck, I'm a man.”

Oliver’s 16-year-old momentarily interrupts us. Comically timed to underscore the tension between sex, the body, and parenting.

Oliver: Even if I’ve got a giant “I’m in a Zoom” sign on the door, the teenagers are not going to stay out.

So, I knew that I couldn’t describe all of this process without talking in detail about my body. It was also a calculated decision. A lot of trans people don’t feel safe talking about their bodies and so a lot of them sensibly, and rightly, choose not to do so. Whereas, I am as safe as a trans person can get. I’m white. I’m transmasculine, not transfeminine. I live in a lovely big house in the suburbs, you know, I am not under a great deal of threat. So I figured, I am one person who can really write into this without feeling like I’m putting myself at risk. I really wanted to do that.

The hardest thing to write was right at the end when I was in the endocrinologist's office, and they were telling me how your genitalia change when you're on testosterone. I was like, “Is that what everybody's going to think every time they see me going forward?” But I'm like, “Fuck it—if they do, they do,” because this is the reality. I really want to be truthful about this.

Kyle: I think this is why you are getting such positive feedback. Your story is a bit like the ghost of Christmas future. You are an example of what it means to keep suppressing yourself for too long. Of course, you’ve evolved into such a lovely human, but you are a lens into what it feels like when you don’t allow yourself to emerge, in your words, on a more natural timeline.

Oliver: Yeah, I mean, I cannot begin to tell you the difference between the person I am now and the person I was before I transitioned.

Kyle: Well, you did write this book.

Oliver: Even when you read the book, you know, there’s no way to describe the permanent feeling of being so highly strung, I could snap at any minute. I was so irritable all the time. I must have been unbearable to be around. Everything made me angry. And that’s all gone. But I look back, and think that to live in that for so long is hideous. To ask anybody to go through that now, to impose any restrictions on anybody, it just makes my heart bleed thinking about it. That’s another reason why I have less fear about being outspoken now. Nothing that can happen now can compare to how awful it felt to be pre-transition.

Kyle: I see a lot of people writing in the chat saying how much they relate to what you’re describing and what it feels like to be constrained. Let’s bring everyone into the conversation.

M: Your memoir is an inspiration as I work on my own. The beginning and end of your book are very linked. Did you have that in mind from early on, or did it come after writing for a while?

Oliver: I really struggled to know where to end this, because memoirs don't really have ends. You just have to choose somewhere to stop. I had written the entire memoir, and then we ended up, just by chance, going out to the same diner where I started the book. As I was driving home, I thought, "I think that might be my ending." I got back home and wrote it that night.

It was a lucky coincidence, but also a conscious decision. I really wanted to end on a scene with the kids. It's not often I get them all together like that. And the fact that we were together having a kind of daft conversation about what they call me—it kind of all came together really well. I wanted to end with something cheerful, not me sort of gazing into the distance.

Kyle: The way you constructed your memoir is quite cinematic. It almost feels like a documentary at times, because you’re so good with the dialogue and capturing scenes. Not that I wish this upon you at all, but the relationship you had with your girlfriend ends up becoming a character study in the tension between some feminists and trans folks. You couldn’t script something so perfect to talk about the dynamic.

Oliver: At the same time as getting my heart really badly broken, I was like, “this is gonna be great material.” If she had just accepted me, where's the story? Where's the conflict? But the fact that she rejected me for becoming a man, suddenly, there's a lot more to talk about.

She wasn't a gender critical feminist [a movement that questions trans identities]. She really believed in my transness—I think she believed in it before I did. She just didn't want men in her life, and I was turning into a man. In the same way that I had to persuade myself that I was allowed to leave my ex-husband for no reason other than I just did not want to be with him anymore, I had to allow her to leave me for no better reason than she just didn't want to be in the relationship anymore.

It's taken me seven years to be able to say that with such simplicity, because obviously, when you're going through it, you don't see things in those terms.

Kyle: It’s nice you didn’t demonize her at all. It’s a very human back-and-forth about yours and hers evolution. Rereading this week, I was struck by how much tenderness there was around her wanting to participate in your emergence.

Oliver: There’s no way we could have stayed together. I wouldn’t be who I am now if we had stayed together, and I think that’s what she knew and what I understand now. It’s annoying that she was right because I’d like to say she was wrong about everything. But she wasn’t. She was right about pretty much everything.

Kyle: Let’s talk parenting. We’re both parents, though we took very different routes to get here. I always knew I wanted to be a parent, but when I started the process, I realized I couldn’t be a mom. I could no longer fight the urge to transition, to be the parent I wanted to be; I had to change. Your story is different. You always imagined yourself as a solo parent, even before you understood your own identity.

Oliver: My denial about both my sexual orientation and my gender identity was so absolute when I was living in England. There was something about crossing the water; moving to America changed everything. Probably because there’s greater visibility over here. Before, everything that I understood about myself had to be retranslated through the idea of a heterosexual woman. When I thought about having children, I just couldn’t picture there being a husband, because I didn’t want to be married to a man. But I couldn’t replace that with a wife because I couldn’t admit that I wanted to be married to a woman. So that left me with the idea of being a solo parent.

I’m also a control freak. I think that’s got nothing to do with gender or sexual orientation. That’s just that I want to bring up my kids my way, I’m not sure I’m good at sharing that responsibility with somebody else.

I do remember hating pregnancy. I felt like an alien before, but during pregnancy, I felt like an alien on steroids.

Kyle: I’m struck that there’s not a single mention of your pregnancies in the book.

Oliver: No. I didn’t want to write about that. I had limited space, and I’d already written too much. The first manuscript was something like 150,000 words long.

Kyle: Oh my god!

Oliver: Yeah, I know. We had to cut a lot. And I had a lot of things happen during my pregnancies, a lot of trauma, I’ve never really separated that out from gender dysphoria. It felt like too big a subject.

Kyle: I wonder if you’ll ever revisit.

Oliver: I think other people have more interesting things to say than I have. I don’t know that there’s much to say apart from if you are uncomfortable with your gender, and then you get pregnant, it’s going to multiply it by a thousand.

Kyle: Growing up, I knew a trans man who became severely depressed after pregnancy. That story is seared in my brain, and I know it affected my own decisions around transitioning and pregnancy.

Oliver: I don’t want to put down on paper my negative feelings about pregnancy, because I never ever want to give my children the impression that it wasn’t worth it. From the minute they were born, we were in different territory. Because then I had a child. And everything that came after that was all worth it, because the concentration was on the child.

The same thing informed how I wrote about the kids in the book. I tried as much as possible to make my writing about the children to be about my feelings, to not imprint them as personalities too much on the page, because, as anyone who has kids knows, your kids change so quickly. The type of kid that you’re writing about when they’re six is different from when they are twelve, is different from when they are sixteen. I didn’t want my children to be the smart one, the funny one, or the artistic one. They will all change so much, I didn’t want to preserve them in amber. So while there are different scenes with them, it was deliberate to never give the reader a strong sense of them.

Kyle: Where did you get your sense of parenting from? Your own childhood was quite different.

Oliver: It was just in reaction to my own childhood and the amount of freaking therapy I've had. I did not want to repeat any of the mistakes from my childhood, but it doesn’t matter, because I've invented a whole bunch of new mistakes which my children will then talk to their therapists about. It all looks good on paper, but in real life, I’m as flawed as every other parent out there. I’m just not repeating the same mistakes as my parents.

When I grew up, it was all rules and no emotional validation whatsoever. So I swung in the opposite way—all emotional validation. And my rules and boundaries maybe haven't been as strong as they should have been.

Kyle: Like the sign on the door.

Oliver: And they fucking ignore it! And are they going to get consequences for that? No, they’re not.

What was most important to me was that whatever they wanted to say, they got to say it, even if they didn't know how to say it in a good way. When my kids are yelling at me and not communicating well, I sit and wait until we can figure out what's going on, rather than shutting them down. Because that’s what I didn’t get.

L: My kid just says to me, “You’re always validating me!”

Oliver: That’s amazing. Now, I feel better. You really can’t win. But I just fundamentally believe that if your kids feel like they're being heard, that's just the best thing you can give them. I don’t think I felt heard until I met my first therapist, Henry in the book.

He was the first person who ever listened to me, and before him, I had no idea what it was like to have that kind of relationship. Learning what it was like to have that with him, I then learned that I could actually have that with other people. But prior to meeting Henry, I had no idea how to have that kind of relationship with anybody. That's why I was still in the closet—I was too scared to tell anybody.

I know my parents didn’t think about their parenting; they just did what everybody else did, and they never questioned it. And they are completely different now, because I forced them to question it. I cannot believe the relationship I have now with them, given the relationship I had when I was younger.

J: Thank you so much for sharing so much about what it’s like to be parenting while figuring yourself out. You are modeling curiosity, while so many in caregiving relationships want to perform mastery or control.

Oliver: When I was growing up, my mother’s favorite phrase was, “Don’t ask questions.” I was taught that curiosity was bad, which is insane. I think curiosity is top of my list of attractive traits in a human being.

So many people, Gen Xers, were brought up with parents who didn’t know how to emotionally validate their kids, didn’t want to answer all these complicated questions, wanted everything to be simple and rule-based.

Your question makes me think about how I am still trying to reconcile for myself that I was going through all of these processes while being a parent. A lot of those periods of time, specifically the two years after I came out to my husband and the couple of years after I split with my girlfriend, I was really, deeply unhappy. And it rubbed off on my kids. We all know that what kids go through in their childhood and adolescence has a lifetime effect on them. So these periods of deep distress and unhappiness that I went through prior to being trans—being deply unhappily trappped in my marriage, getting my heartbroken. I live with the fact that they didn’t grow up in an ideal family where they just had two parents.

I was standing in line at the airport the other day, and I was watching this family. A mother and father and two young kids, and they were just all laughing. They were playing with the kids and laughing with each other. And I thought, “God, I wish I’d been able to give that to my children.” But, I couldn’t because we weren’t happy.

When people ask me what I regret, I don’t regret anything that I’ve been through, because everything that I went through made me who I am today. But I really regret not being able to give my kids that kind of. childhood. I also had to learn to forgive myself, because I made the changes necessary so that I can model freedom to my kid, and authenticity, and I can say to them, “If you are ever unhappy in any situation in your life, make the changes. Do not stay in that unhappy place.” Although I didn’t give them that perfect, happy childhood, I did at least give them the message that they too should never ever stay trapped in a situation, a place, a relationship, or an identity that doesn’t work for them.

It’s not all been sunshine and rainbows and butterflies. But I hope they’ll all come through okay.

Kyle: I hope they’re proud of you, even if they can’t say it now, because their frontal cortex is not fully developed. There’s someone on the call tonight that I met in the 90s because we both had gay dads. Most of us who knew each other back then with queer parents, had parents who came out of heterosexual relationships. My brother is here tonight, too. We had a lot go down in our childhoods that was difficult. But it was a gift for us to see our Dad take on real risk to become his full self.

B: You said earlier that the only interesting thing about your life is that you transitioned. I don’t think that’s true. The whole time I was reading the book, I was struck that you were raising four children basically alone. By the end, I thought, “This person should be the mayor of New York.”

Oliver: I totally should.

B: After I finished, I looked to see if there were any reviews from British newspapers and I couldn’t find any. I feel like this would be such a helpful book for that particular context, given the wall-to-wall transphobia of the British media. As a British person, there were lots of bits in the book that spoke to me. Especially your parents, who made me laugh more than anything else.

Oliver: I know you know those parents.

B: I do.

Oliver: The answer is, I don’t know. The book was published in England and it did not get one single piece of press. Even though we had an amazing marketing person who worked her socks off for six months prior to publication. I went over there for the launch, which was really fun. I thought, like you, that this would be really interesting for a British market, because I talk about a lot of stuff that the Brits don’t normally talk about. I talk about class, for a start, and the Brits down’ like talking about class, but they love listening to other people talk about class.

My first book [Adult Human Male] obviously speaks directly to British Gender Critical Feminists, and this book doesn’t. I don’t know why it didn’t hit a chord over there. I wonder if the whole of Britain has been so infected by gender critical feminism and transphobia that the press doesn’t want to touch it.

Over here, you kind of know who your people are, the distinction between people who are supportive and people who are transphobic is much clearer. Whereas in England, I feel like I’m always a little less certain who genuinely is an ally. The transphobia is more severe here, and the proposed restrictions on our lives are obviously more severe, but at least I know who my people are.

A: Thank you for writing your book; it will be a special book on my bookshelf forever. I’m curious what the role of writing has been in your life?

Oliver: The role of writing in my life felt like a simultaneous reveal to me. I uncovered my sexual orientation, then my gender identity, and also the fact that writing felt like a vocation. I hadn’t been able to embrace that earlier in my life because, in order to write, you have to know who you are. You have to write from a place of authenticity.

I’d always known I was creative. I tried to be an actor, a photographer, a landscape designer. I tried all of these different things. None of them really fit. Everything that I was doing felt derivative. Nothing that I was doing felt authentic, and none of them got me into that place where I felt like I was creating something genuinely original.

When I started writing about this stuff and LGBTQ issues, that’s when the good stuff started coming out. I thought, “This is what I’ve been looking for all my life.” It became something I had to do every day. Like an anti-anxiety drug.

Every writer wants their stuff to get read, but if I had just been writing with the aim of getting published, I would have given up long before. The real drive to keep writing was this feeling that I can keep getting better and better. I’m never going to get as good as the writers that I really admire, but I know that I will keep developing this craft. That has kept me going, because it took me years to write this memoir.

The first time my agent sent out my manuscript, we started getting rejections from all the editors, all of them saying the same thing: “Don't know how to market this. Don't know who your audience is.” That was when Roxane Gay announced she was opening an imprint at Grove Atlantic. The minute I read that, I knew I needed to pull my manuscript from submission and rewrite it for Roxane. There was stuff I hadn’t put in the manuscript because I couldn’t, I was too scared to talk about. But then I told myself I was just writing for Roxane. I spent nine months rewriting; it was madness, insanity. And then I sent it back to my agent and asked that she send it to Roxane first. Two or three weeks later, we got a call from her that she wanted to buy the manuscript.

I know it sounds like a made-up story.

Kyle: You’re The Secret.

Oliver: Or like that movie about Jonathan Larson.

Kyle: Tick, Tick, Boom. And then you manifested your cover by Oliver Jeffers.

Oliver: I think I used up all of my genie wishes on this book.

Kyle: It’s incredible.

Oliver: For anybody out there who's a writer—if you know you've got that thing happening when you write, just don't freaking give up. I didn't have a plan B, and the best thing you can have is no plan B. What else was I going to do? I just wanted to be a writer, and I just want to keep writing for the rest of my life. I'm going to earn shit, I'm going to be penniless in the end, because it’s a terrible way to make a living. But, I'm gonna die happy.

Kyle: Well, I think I speak for everyone on this call, amongst many others, that I’m so glad you kept writing. And thrilled that Roxane Gay picked up your manuscript. It’s a great lesson in having a clear reader. You knew exactly who you were writing for, and she felt it. Thank you, Oliver.

Oliver Radclyffe’s memoir Frighten the Horses is available now and hardback or you can pre-order the paperback which comes out this fall.

Being Alive is reading Tourmaline’s MARSHA this month. Join us on Zoom, Monday June 30th to discuss.

More Oliver Radclyffe:

• Read: Adult Human Male (Unbound Press)

• Read: Brevis Scriptor (Substack)

• Follow: @oliverradclyffe (Instagram)