A friend of mine, Jo, 29, says that being disabled brings up similar feelings to their queerness when they’re in public spaces, too. “I feel like this about having chronic pain because you don’t feel like a ‘problem’ until you’re made to feel that way,” they say. “You don’t ‘feel’ that label until you realise the world is built with a different default.”

SL Crawley, an associate professor of sociology whose research centres on queer theory and gender, says that “the interactional cues of stigma can be subtle and unspoken – but feel very real and palpable”, which is probably why I find this feeling so hard to pinpoint in exact terms. It’s like trying to grasp at smoke. Crawley continues: “According to the sociologist Irving Goffman, people work together to make sense of their worlds through interactional ‘rules’. We may not even notice how much we follow the ‘rules’ of interaction most of the time – until we are the object of stigma.”

Until now, I hadn’t recognised the uneasy feeling I get in majority straight spaces as being the result of microaggressions. But Crawley makes me reconsider. “The concept of microaggressions has been powerful because it names a common feeling that people with marginalised identities have – usually around race but it can apply to other kinds of identities,” they explain. “The word ‘aggression’ makes the interaction seem intentional, though intention isn’t necessary for an event to be a microaggression. For marginalised people, the subtle interactional cues of having one’s difference NOT being recognised are very prominent.”

“As a queer person, will I ever be able to properly relax around straight people?”