I wager that most trans folks can articulate a veritable litany of disorientations: the moments wherein we’re referred to by the wrong name, the wrong pronoun, the wrong honorific; the moments when our bodies are referred to with language that registers dissonantly, inaccurately; the moments wherein we are touched in ways that trigger rage, sadness, dysphoria, self-hatred, self-harm, where our bodies are being interacted with as if they were something other than how we understand and inhabit them. In each of these moments, which are so routine as to constitute a trans genre of misrecognition, we experience some form of disorientation. We are forced to ask ourselves whether or not a person or institution means to hail us, forced to wonder whether we are or are not being hailed. This, in turn, prompts us to consider, repetitively and frequently, how we are manifesting in a given room, how are we signifying, how our interpellation and positioning in the world might be clashing with our self-understanding. We are pushed to confront, over and over again, how the world in which we find ourselves is constructed in ways that refuse, exclude, elide, or overwrite our sense of existence.
– Hil Malatino, Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (2022)
