Adult Human Male

“This is not queer theory. This is my flesh and blood,” writes Oliver Radclyffe in this spirited polemic on trans identity. Presenting his careful logic with lyrical prose, Radclyffe disrupts — intentionally, pointedly, playfully — the current structure of popular debates on gender. 

With Adult Human Male, he rejects the academic argot of theoretical constructs and, instead, recenters the trans body as fundamental to a humanist inquiry into identity. Radclyffe posits that the cis perspective — from which nearly all gender discussions begin — is anything but neutral and thus demands both interrogation and expansion so that trans identity is not viewed through a hostile lens.

Adult Human Male marks an important advance in how to understand, discuss, and respect the trans experience.

"A moment of literary calm amid the wild seas of our current political and cultural landscape" Sophia AnFinn Tonnessen

“A brief but powerful and affecting book on the struggles of the trans community” Kirkus Reviews

“In Radclyffe’s hands, transness becomes intimate and undeniably real” Alexander Cheves