GLR January-February 2025

B RIAN A LESSANDRO Who Owns This Body? FRIGHTEN THE HORSES by Oliver Radcly ff e Roxane Gay Books. 352 pages, $28. N OVELISTIC AND EPISODIC, Oliver Radclyffe’s memoir Frighten the Horses is written with verve, humor, and specificity. His story begins in an affluent British family, where Oliver was raised to take his state of priv ilege for granted. Later in life, however, he would have to con tend with the social challenges of a different kind of status: his transmasculine identity. “I’d been bound by the rules and regu lations of upper-class English society since the day I was born,” he writes, “although even now in my diasporic state it is excru ciating to admit this.” Assigned female at birth, Oliver grows up and marries a man named Charles who works in finance. The couple raise four children in Connecticut, and all seems harmonious in their idyl lic world until Oliver begins to yearn for sex with women. Ini tially believing himself to be a lesbian, Oliver tells Charles of his orientation, expecting a divorce. Charles instead takes an English stiff upper lip and expects his wife to suppress the de sire and tell no one. Eventually, he relents and encourages Oliver to seek out women to explore his feelings. Oliver’s exploration of LGBT culture and history feels an thropological as he seeks to understand his role within this mul tifarious milieu. He writes thoughtfully and sensitively about his encounters with several women. His explanations are con sistently self-reflexive and eschew glib pronouncements. His analysis of the sensations that emerge with each interaction are comprehensively evaluated and challenged. He finds himself in Brooklyn, a place “progressive” enough for the new family dy namic: “I wondered whether these were the sort of people who might make me feel more whole.” As I read through both of Joy Ladin’s new books, I heard and felt again the wise, compassionate, inspirational voice of a living prophet. And I felt called, as you may be as well, to reach out with a heartfelt commitment to our whole queer family, and to everyone we share this damaged planet with, to work for a better world. _______________________________________________________ Eli Andrew Ramer’s most recent book is Ever After: The Extended Lives and Work of Eleven Famous Writers . Along the way to transitioning, while keeping her true self a secret, Ladin wrote in the essay “Myself—The Term Between: A Trans Poetic Autobiography”: “I was an abstraction trying to write like a person, a lie imagining what it would/ say if it were true.” In “Ours for the Making: Trans Lit, Trans Poetics” she reminds us that: “By casting the net of ‘Trans Literature’ wide we will ... recognize that transgender experience ... is a partic ularly striking enactment of a mismatch between psyche, body, and social role that is central to being human.”

After dating several women, Oliver realizes that he’s most comfortable playing a dominant and assertive role during sex, and soon begins to imagine life as a man, which feels right de spite his anxious misgivings: “A fully embodied experience not just of making love to a woman, but of making love as a man.” Oliver discovers that he has a phantom penis and becomes en amored of the trappings of being a man. Simultaneously, the re alities of womanhood become intolerable: “I felt suffocated by the smell of face powder and expensive perfume, overwhelmed by the glitter of silk and lipstick and jewelry.” Oliver writes about Charles with understanding—”This meant he hadn’t just married a lesbian; he’d married a man”— but he’s also hurt by his parents and family friends, who seem more concerned about the effect of the transition on Charles and the children than on Oliver himself. Tellingly, his parents were almost enthusiastically supportive of Oliver when they thought he was a lesbian. “Oh Daddy,” said Oliver when he came out initially as gay. “I thought you believed homosexuality was a sin.” “I did,” answered Oliver’s father. “[I stopped] a few min utes ago when I found out I had a gay daughter.” While Oliver’s interactions within the LGBT community are revealing, his attempts to come to terms with his male iden tity are especially moving. “I wish it didn’t matter so much to me, but after a lifetime of feeling invisible, I was desperate to be seen.” Indeed the title of this memoir is a British expression about being discreet and not making a public display of one self—in other words, being invisible so as not to frighten the horses. Oliver encounters resistance from some of his female part ners when he comes out to them. “I am sick of men,” says Jamie, a woman with whom Oliver was romantically involved before his transition, who had left her husband to be with a woman, ”You can’t hold me accountable if you turn into some thing I can’t love,” she tells Oliver. Radclyffe’s prose is vigorously corporeal and sensory. He puts us in his body at every turn, with vivid physiological reac tions to situations and insightful responses to revelations. He doesn’t just tell us about his gender dysphoria, he shows us. Every ache and flash of embarrassment, every jolt of panic and frustration, is written with phenomenological anguish, and also with great wit. “Given the choice between Virginia Woolf and Quentin Crisp, I’d rather be an Englishman in New York.” He writes poignantly and incisively about body ownership: “Who does my body belong to? Who is my body for? It’s like my fem ininity’s a gift I’ve been giving to other people for so long that they’ve just come to expect it, and if I take it back everyone’s going to accuse me of being selfish. What I wanted was appar ently irrelevant because everyone else’s claim on my body ex ceeded my own.” With tireless compassion and microscopic meditations, Rad clyffe brings us through his psychological, emotional, and phys ical transitions. All the while he considers the impact his changes will have on his children. His journey is fueled by courage, honesty, and unabashed self-love, but his craft as a writer is equally remarkable: “I’d let go of my country, my wealth, my class, my heterosexuality, and finally now my gen der, until I was nothing but a body spinning in space.” _______________________________________________________ Brian Alessandro is a writer who’s based in Roselle Park, NJ.

January–February 2025

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