Side Affects
On Being Trans and Feeling Bad
Hil Malatino
LISTEN: HIL MALATINO AND ZENA SHARMAN IN CONVERSATION (HOSTED BY WHITE WHALE BOOKSTORE)
How the “bad feelings” of trans experience inform trans survival and flourishing
Some days—or weeks, or months, or even years—being trans feels bad. In Side Affects, Malatino opens a new conversation about trans experience that acknowledges the reality of feeling fatigue, envy, burnout, numbness, and rage amid the ongoing onslaught of casual and structural transphobia in order to map the intricate emotional terrain of trans survival.
"Hil Malatino has become an indispensable thinker when it comes to trans scholarship, somehow able to put into words not just ideas but feelings that I had previously found ineffable and unspeakable, a talent that is familiar to me from the very best of literature."
—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
Some days—or weeks, or months, or even years—being trans feels bad. Yet as Hil Malatino points out, there is little space for trans people to think through, let alone speak of, these bad feelings. Negative emotions are suspect because they unsettle narratives of acceptance or reinforce virulently phobic framings of trans as inauthentic and threatening.
In Side Affects, Malatino opens a new conversation about trans experience that acknowledges the reality of feeling fatigue, envy, burnout, numbness, and rage amid the ongoing onslaught of casual and structural transphobia in order to map the intricate emotional terrain of trans survival. Trans structures of feeling are frequently coded as negative on both sides of transition. Before transition, narratives are framed in terms of childhood trauma and being in the “wrong body.” Posttransition, trans individuals—especially trans people of color—are subject to unrelenting transantagonism. Yet trans individuals are discouraged from displaying or admitting to despondency or despair.
By moving these unloved feelings to the center of trans experience, Side Affects proposes an affective trans commons that exists outside political debates about inclusion. Acknowledging such powerful and elided feelings as anger and exhaustion, Malatino contends, is critical to motivating justice-oriented advocacy and organizing—and recalibrating new possibilities for survival and well-being.
Awards
Foreword: INDIES — Honorable Mention, LGBTQ+ category
$21.95 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-1209-3
$88.00 cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-1208-6
240 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, 2022
Hil Malatino is assistant professor in the departments of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and philosophy at Penn State. He is author of Trans Care (Minnesota, 2020) and Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience.
Hil Malatino has become an indispensable thinker when it comes to trans scholarship, somehow able to put into words not just ideas but feelings that I had previously found ineffable and unspeakable, a talent that is familiar to me from the very best of literature.
Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
Down with the narrative tyranny of gender dysphoria and euphoria! Side Affects dares invoke a trans right to feel bad, not as antidote to normativity but as a portal to the complex feelings of transition that have been buried by medicalization, activist urgency, and the collateral damage of transphobia. Hil Malatino delivers a powerful trans reckoning for feminist, queer, and affect studies.
Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender Child
Overall, it’s an amazingly informative publication that I’m certain will enlighten many people in academia, trans, or otherwise.
neowitcher reads
Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad, rejects the sanitized narratives of the moral and intellectual purity of transness meant to please the cis gaze. Instead, it delves into a conversation around the trans experience that acknowledges the reality of feeling, fatigue, envy, burnout, numbness, and rage amid the ongoing onslaught of casual and structural transphobia as a way to map the emotional terrain of trans survival.
Shondaland
The book provides an insider's view of the bleaker and more frustrating aspects of transition, too often downplayed since transgender people were forcibly enlisted as combatants in the so-called culture wars.
Boston Review
Malatino’s argument is firmly grounded in current trans, queer, and feminist theory, while it invokes the methods of poststructural critique and phenomenological interrogation.
CHOICE
Reading Hil Malatino’s Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad offered me permission to see my life and the terror of this current political moment with more honesty.
X-Tra
Contents
Introduction
1. Future Fatigue: Trans Intimacies and Trans Presents (or How to Survive the Interregnum)
2. Fuck Feelings: On Numbness, Withdrawal, and Disorientation
3. Found Wanting: On Envy
4. Tough Breaks: Trans Rage and the Cultivation of Resilience
5. Beyond Burnout: On the Limits of Care and Cure
6. After Negativity? On Whiteness and Healing
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About This Book
Related Publications
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Xtra Magazine Queer Culture Catch-Up featuring SIDE AFFECTS
Ms. Magazine Recommends SIDE AFFECTS
The book provides an insider’s view of the bleaker and more frustrating aspects of transition, too often downplayed since transgender people were forcibly enlisted as combatants in the so-called culture wars.
Xtra Magazine Queer Culture Catch-Up featuring SIDE AFFECTS
Malatino, author of SIDE AFFECTS and a professor at Penn State, has actually written a book about (among other things) the ways in which trans people are simultaneously pressured to display our difficulties but are talked out of (or shamed out of) our hard feelings.
Ms. Magazine Recommends SIDE AFFECTS
In the first of two books focused on trans well-being this month, Hil Malatino makes an imperative argument for the right of trans people to feel bad and use those feelings to continue fighting for joy and justice.
In Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad, Malatino writes that the same cultural biases that make many trans folks feel badly about themselves in the first place also prevent them from conveying the resultant emotions.
Observer: "A Captivating Argument That Liberation Shouldn't Just Be Joy"
Hil Malatino's 'Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad' argues liberation isn't found in gender euphoria but systemic change.
Book Riot: 10 Queer Books from Indie Presses You Definitely Don't Want to Miss This Year
These ten upcoming indie press books are just ten of the many I can’t wait to get my hands on. This list reflects my personal interests, so it’s heavily weighted toward contemporary fiction and hybrid nonfiction. But no matter what kind of queer book you’re craving, I guarantee you’ll find something here to fall in love with. These ten books are a great representation of just how varied queer lit from indie presses is.
Gender Jawn Podcast: Trans Care with Hil Malatino
In this episode, the second on this year’s theme, Care for the Future, Gwendolyn Beetham and Tamir Williams speak with Hil Malatino about his books TRANS CARE and SIDE AFFECTS: ON BEING TRANS AND FEELING BAD.
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Honesty is at the root of this semi-biographical look at being trans: if you are trans, says Malatino, you may struggle with several righteously negative feelings you have — disconnect, anger, fear, numbness, burnout, exhaustion — feelings that exist, in part, because of the times in which we live now and the transphobia that seems to be everywhere.