Name: Latitude Tamarind's review of Side Affects by Hil Malatino
Item: Side Affects
Rating: 4
Author: Latitude Tamarind

Hil Malatino

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. 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.

On Being Trans and Feeling Bad

Side Affects

Latitude Tamarind

This book was uh. Very Scientific, and I was definitely expecting something more like a pop-psychology book? Very Academic, very Queer Theory. It’s a great book! But it wasn’t really my cup of tea, just because I already do SO MUCH academic reading for school. If you are a person who is not Actively In College, I recommend this book – if you like that kind of writing. Three and a half stars from me, rounded up for Goodreads.

Bex &
Side Affects by Hil Malatino

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Bex &
Side Affects by Hil Malatino