ALTERCASTING is the act of assigning an identity to someone else. That may seem at first glance like an intrusive act: shouldn't the assignment of identities be reserved for the people themselves? But we do it all the time. Those of us with the most fervent commitment to people's authority to define their own identity may work hard at not stereotyping people and trying to be open to multiple possibilities, but in the absence of being able to literally read other people's minds, we still do it. We formulate in our own minds a sense of who each other person is, in order to be able to interact with them, in order to be able to even think about them. At a minimum we tend to think of them as humans, and the moment we do that we altercast them in the role of human as we define and understand human. And we usually don't stop with only perceiving a person as an undifferentiated human. We notice things, clues to a person's identity, we make some educated guesses based on our own experience of people and society.
We care about other people's altercasting of us, it matters to us. If it did not, there would not exist any such thing as misgendering. If it did not, if we truly didn't care how others perceived us, we would also have to not care how others behaved towards us, how they treated us, because their interactive behaviors towards us are a direct outcome of how they perceive us.
This is why a person's identity is not composed entirely of who that person is to themselves, how they choose to identify. We may wish it to be that way or want it to be that way, particularly as a vehicle towards empowering them to self-define, but the real fact of the matter is that a person's identity is always the subject of dialogue between that person and all of the other people who perceive them and interact with them. A person's identity is always in a state of negotiation.
PRESENTING is the act of soliciting an ideal altercasted identity from other people, of getting them to altercast us with an assigned identity that pleases us, and often that will be at least a close approximation of our self-defined identity. Not always: the concept of being in the closet is about presenting so as to disguise one's identity instead of presenting so as to be seen and recognized. But as people who are out, as people who are political about our identity, we tend to devote a lot of energy into presenting our identity to the world, attempting to get people to altercast us the same way that we cast our own identities in our own minds.
It doesn't work if the people that we interact with do not have the necessary concepts to be able to think of us in the same way that we think of ourselves. If one happens to have a visible appearance that is culturally understood as a representation of one gender or sex (and in our culture's mainstream and in our culture's history, gender and sex have been one and the same), but also exhibits other signals (behaviors, et al) that are culturally understood as representative of the other, this is a presentation that could elicit an altercasting as gay, could evoke an altercasting as transgender or nonbinary or otherwise gender-atypical, but if the other people that one is interacting with have in their heads no interpretation of this combination except that it is wrong and pathological, it is instead going to inspire an altercasting as sick, twisted, wrong. And so we educate. We teach. We describe and defend and elaborate and we tell our experiences and outline how we think of ourselves, and we do all this in order to create in other people's head-space the possibility of seeing us more the way we wish to be seen.
Some of our PRESENTATION is a deliberate oversimplification; although our orientation or gender identity labels are not the entirety of our identity, any more than our age or our ethnicity is, the complex entirety of who we are is certainly not something that random strangers and casual acquaintances already have inside their heads to categorize us as. And so although we don't want to be reduced to a label or two in perpetuity and never known by anyone beyond a couple of general categories, most of us do position ourselves for easy recognition and categorization by the labels that let most people jump to some fairly decent first-tier approximations. Most cisgender heterosexual men present as men; most cisgender heterosexual women present as women; it is a cultural imperative that one should be clearly recognized and categorized by gender and treated accordingly. It is not that these individuals do not wish to ever be seen for the complex and unique people that they are, but that having folks react to them with these starting points is far more comfortable to them than for them to not do so. In fact, it is quite often a person's discovery that they themselves are uncomfortable with that altercasting that leads to a person's awareness of themselves as gender-atypical!
At any rate, we use a lot of shorthand when we present. We use the equivalent of a logo and a slogan on an everyday basis because we only occasionally get the opportunity to provide people with the equivalent of an article, let alone a novel.
Part of the price tag of marginalization is that all of this--the act of presentation and the successful result, an appropriate altercasting by the other people we encounter--is much more complicated and difficult. I said above that most cisgender heterosexual men present as men. A cisgender gay man who does not wish to be altercast as a heterosexual male is likely to attempt to present as a specifically gay man. He has to encode more information in his shorthand, still conveying that he is a man but due to being an exception to the rule, a marginalized variant, he has to convey additional information to avoid being altercast as something he is not, see? And his success (an appropriate altercasting by other people as a gay man) depends on them having that possibility in their head, that when they think of people they are aware of that possibility and that they recognize the shorthand cues and clues that he uses. If this individual were a nonbinary pansexual demiboy, their situation is quantum leaps more difficult and the likelihood of provoking a successfully correct altercasting from other people is extremely attenuated. The signals and cues have to convey a lot more information (they're not merely an exception to the rule but an exception to the exception to the exception) and the likelihood of the typical person they interact with being aware of the possibility of their identity is vanishingly small, and on top of that the people interacting with them would need to recognize the shorthand, which is even less likely than having heard of it or read about it.
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