To admit that sometimes, just maybe, being trans doesn't always feel great, in the face of overwhelming, contemporary transphobic and transmisogynistic political and social structures, is to risk having that feeling weaponized, used as evidence in a culture war that seeks to suppress all trans existence. Consequently, with rare exception, little work has been done yet to theorize the negative affects specific to transness: the bad feelings that entangle us because of our relation to the world as trans people.
In Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad, Hil Malatino examines trans negative affect, constellated around five specific bad feelings: fatigue, numbness, envy, rage, and burnout. Building on Eric Stanley's use of Lauren Berlant's affective commons (9), Malatino identifies these feelings as part of a “trans affective commons,” which are “practices of caring interrelationality . . . that shape trans modes of being-in-the-world” (4). In other words, these...
