Unbound Edition Press today announced it will publish a monograph by trans author Oliver Radclyffe, titled Adult Human Male. The title is the second in the press’s monograph series, following Janet Hardy’s forthcoming Notes of an Aging Pervert. Both titles are scheduled for release in September 2023.
Radclyffe’s spirited polemic disrupts – intentionally, pointedly, playfully – the current structure of popular debates on gender. Adult Human Male rejects the academic argot of theoretical constructs and, instead, recenters the trans body as fundamental to a humanist inquiry into identity.
“You can’t stand in ideological opposition to a body,” said Radclyffe. “You can object to it, or demand control over it, or try to legislate against it, but that’s not a moral position, that’s authoritarianism. We must remember that the cis perspective is not neutral. And my trans identity is not ideological.”
Patrick Davis, publisher at Unbound Edition Press, said, “We exist to publish literary dissent from fearless writers. Oliver checks those boxes across the board, and he is exceptional at his writerly craft.”
Radclyffe’s work first came to the attention of the press through entertainment executive Stephanie Laffin, who shared an Electric Lit piece Radclyffe authored called “I Found My Queer Guidebook in The Well of Loneliness,” a reflection on the classic Radclyffe Hall novel. “I read and re-read that book because it struck me as about love and loss resulting from emerging masculinity.” Oliver Radclyffe adopted his name from the Hall’s.
“’Sex is real’ is the rallying cry of the gender-critical feminists, and on this point we are entirely in agreement. If our bodies didn’t matter, we wouldn’t go to such painful lengths to align them with our identities. What I dispute is the idea that sex is immutable,” said Radclyffe. “If we allow ourselves to understand sex as both profoundly important and relatively elastic, then gender becomes far less relevant. We can, perhaps, get rid of the word gender altogether. We are, simply, humans taking a broad range of forms.”
Adult Human Male was acquired by Unbound Edition Press through agent Malaga Baldi at Baldi Books, New York.
