FRIGHTEN THE HORSES: A Memoir, by Oliver Radclyffe 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.