Misgendering

It doesn’t sound like much

to someone who’s never felt it,

one wrong word,

a pronoun misplaced,

like a pebble tossed

into conversation.

But it lands like stone.

Suddenly the room is colder.

The air shifts.

My body stiffens.

I smile to stay safe.

I nod to keep things moving.

Inside, I’m disappearing.

It’s not just a slip.

It’s an undoing,

of self, of trust,

of being real

in front of you.

This artwork is a personal response to the experience of being misgendered. The word “she” appears once, incorrectly, and is surrounded by shattered fragments of a hand-drawn pencil portrait, scanned, printed and then rearranged into a collage. The process was intentionally disjointed. I drew the figure carefully, then destroyed the image, cutting it into pieces that no longer quite fit together. That rupture mirrors what happens internally when someone uses the wrong pronoun: a moment of disconnect, disorientation, and erasure.

“Misgendering” by Rae Sabine

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