#hermeneutical injustice

[taliabhattwrites]

The most widespread form of transmisogyny within the queer community is denying trans women epistemic authority.

Which means: people do not believe us on our own experiences. They frequently assume any and all oppression we face must be mild or must simply be anti-effeminacy instead of "real misogyny". We are considered to be exaggerating the material consequences of bigotry on us and assumed to not experience various harms that we in fact do, including medical misogyny, sexual violence, CSA, being infantilized and dismissed, being inadequately represented (since most popular depictions of us are cissexist caricatures and do not authentically portray our lived realities!), and more besides.

Perhaps the most hysteria inducing aspect of this is being told that our testimony is not frequently dismissed, BY PEOPLE WHO ARE ACTIVELY DISMISSING OUR TESTIMONY ON HOW MUCH MISOGYNY AND DEGENDERING AND VIOLENCE WE EXPERIENCE.

We are not "new to oppression". We do not have to be taught what it is like to be feminized and dehumanized under patriarchy. We are painfully familiar with how misogyny operates and experience it regularly, in addition to having to justify even to "our" communities that we do in fact experience it!

That, my friends, is the core of transmisogyny: being dehumanized while being denied the right to even name one's oppression or have it be acknowledged as such!

[indizombie]

Hermeneutical injustice operates in caste through the lack of available language or conceptual frameworks to describe and articulate the experiences of people from DBA communities. Dominant cultural narratives and discourses do not have adequate means to capture their experiences and this makes it difficult for them to express themselves or be understood by others. Also, most of the scholarship on caste oppression is mostly written by the oppressor castes with a savarna gaze that portrays the oppression in a completely different light. The knowledge and cultural practices of oppressors are always considered classical, and the cultural and artistic products of DBA are relegated to the bottom. The discomfort and suffocation that a DBA individual feels when they enter savarna dominated spaces like academia or media is mainly due to the erasure of identity and cultural shock they experience by not being able to connect or articulate in the language or assimilate into the culture of savarnas. The way to battle hermeneutical injustice is by questioning the language, culture and scholarship created by savarnas, and expanding the vocabulary to be able articulate the experiences of DBA by more inclusion of marginalized groups into academia, media, journalism, law etc.

Pranav Jeevan, ‘Epistemic Injustice: Does Knowledge have Caste?’, Round Table India

[rudetuesday]

I have a couple of folders full of screenshots with no useful titles. I know this is from a video I saw on YouTube, so now I need to look at my viewing/browsing history. Digital clutter is a a problem.

[tricky-pockets]

please I am begging

the egg post is still doing numbers and I'm still having fun being called a dumbass in an affectionate way, BUT

I also very sincerely regret not adding the real explanation for how I pledged a frat and didn't realize I was a dude: I DIDN'T KNOW ANY TRANS PEOPLE (or, well, maybe I did, but I didn't know I did). This was in like 2008. I didn't recognize myself as transgender because I barely even knew the word. Was I also oblivious? Absolutely. But it was also a product of our invisibility and otherization.

Anyway, go read Epistemic Injustice by Miranda Fricker, who presents (among other things) the following very useful concept:

Hermeneutical injustice is: the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource.

Or, in other words: when you're part of a marginalized group and you don't get to be part of the conversation people are having about you, you can - through no fault of your own - end up lacking concepts crucial to making sense of your own experiences. And that makes it harder to share or explain those experiences to anyone else, which only compounds the problem.

This is why the words are actually kinda fuckin important.

[anendoandfriendo]

We don't think that people understand that not having the words to describe their own experiences actually IS its own special kind of hell, and also a literal form of oppression.

It's called hermeneutical injustice, so like YEAH — even if endogenics' concerns was the ability to have the word endogenic that is still very very bad and you are still a raging bigot, asshole.

[fountainpenchess]

It is possible to see how pre-emptive testimonial injustice and testimonial smothering contribute to ignorance regarding suicidal people's experiences, because their voices remain relatively absent from the public sphere or are transformed or adapted to be more "acceptable", in turn fostering hermeneutical injustice and leading to greater difficulty in theorizing suicidist oppression–and hence perpetuating the deadly silencing circle of epistemic violence.

— alexandre baril, suicidism: a new theoretical framework to conceptualize suicide from an anti-oppressive perspective 

[purgaytorysupremacy]

I would like everyone to know that I will be celebrating November 5th by presenting the draft outline of this paper to my graduate-level "uses and abuses of history" philosophy class

[generalburner]

Hey there, submitter here 👋 Now that it's long over and I can't influence anyone's answers, I wanted to share what the point of this was

(But before that let me concur with the disclaimers incognitopolls added. This poll is indeed trans inclusive, not about genitals, and disinterested in whether anyone is a "real" lesbian.)

So, personally, I'm a lesbian who is both not attracted any man and would never have sex with any man under any circumstances. 100% of all people who have ever heard that I was a lesbian and then still thought there was some chance I might like men have done so because they were homophobic, so I will go on assuming that anyone who does that to me in the future is being homophobic, regardless of the existence of lesbians who do have any interest in men. Seeing as the results here confirm my assumption that the majority of lesbians don't have any interest men or have very little interest in very limited circumstances, I think that's fair of me. I don't think that makes me an exclusionist or whatever.

There absolutely needs to be a word to refer to the concept of a woman who likes women but not men. The best word we have for that is "lesbian", regardless of if that doesn't describe 100% of all lesbians. Why does there need to be a word we can use when we mean a woman who likes women but not men? Well, I can't possibly give you a better explanation of the concept of hermeneutical injustice than cj the x did, so i'm just gonna splice in their explanation from a completely unrelated video here. (I'm linking to a short clip from it so I suggest you watch it if you care enough to be reading this.)

"The philosopher Miranda Fricker coined this concept of Hermeneutical Injustice. This is when you lack the social language to communicate what you are experiencing to other people, therefore isolating you in your experience, and rendering you unable to name it, understand it, share it with others, do something about it. If there's no socially understood name for the thing you're experiencing or if you do not know the name for the thing you're experiencing, you're damned to experience it alone, wondering if it's even real, if you even deserve to feel this way about this thing you can't even articulate."

The point isn't that you're an "invalid lesbian" or whatever if the meaning "woman who likes women but not men" doesn't fully apply to you. I myself am genderfluid. The point is that if someone tells you they're a lesbian, assuming that means they aren't interested in men at all is the right thing to do.

I made this poll because I just wanted to know how many other lesbians felt the way I do.

Just to be very, very clear: this blog supports trans women. This is not asking about genital preference, nor whether you would have sex with a trans person, nor if you're "really" a lesbian based on your answer. Sexuality is complex and there are countless reasons a person might choose to have sex with someone else.

Be polite in the comments/reblogs.

–

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[biblebloodhound]

The Contrast of Good and Bad (1 Samuel 2:11-17)

This method of contrast is meant for us to look at the narrative and say to ourselves that we don’t want to go down the bad path but to walk in the good way of helpful service.

Top picture: Eli’s sons commit sacrilege; Bottom picture: Hannah and Elkanah bring the boy Samuel to the tabernacle; by William de Brailes, c.1230 C.E. Elkanah and Hannah went back home to Ramah, but the boy Samuel stayed to help Eli serve the Lord. Eli’s sons were priests, but they were dishonest and refused to obey the Lord. So, while people were boiling the meat from their sacrifices, these…

[taliabhattwrites]

My critique of cultural anthropology and academic transmisogyny, "The Third Sex", will be published in a few days. Here's the introduction.

This Machine Builds Fascists

Consider a mechanism whose sole function is to classify all inputs it receives as one of two categories: One and Zero. The inputs, it must be said, vary greatly in temperament, expression, embodiment, internality, and so on, but that isn’t as much of a hurdle for the machine as it seems. It has been programmed with a few simple lines of code that enable it to differentiate between Ones and Zeroes within acceptable margins of tolerance. Ones tend to look and behave like this, Zeroes tend to be like that. These truisms are crude, simplistic, and even reductive, true, but they work. As such, the machine chugs on, happily reducing complex inputs to a blunt binary classification, its delivery-day code having been deemed “good enough”.

Of course, there is still the matter of how the machine should behave when its schema fails, when it is presented with inputs that do indeed prove to be too ambiguous to easily classify. For however high the correlation between traits, sometimes a specimen that simply defies easy categorization will confound its decision-making, often enough to pose a problem. Does the code need to be updated? Almost certainly, but legacy code is a stubborn thing, mired in dependencies and versioning faff, deeply resistant to the most perfunctory of edits. Too many now rely on this iteration of the machine, on this particular instantiation of its logic, and it is almost universally agreed that any changes are best handled downstream—at least, among those with the power to change it.

The machine and its users are thus forced to consider: In the case of an “error”, a “mistake”, so to speak, is it better to classify something as a One or a Zero?

Well, that’s an easy enough decision. The Ones, you see, are quite important, are believed to play a rather critical role in the affairs the machine oversees. The Zeroes … sure, they’re certainly important too, in their own way, in the way everything worth categorizing is—but the Ones! It’s really all about the Ones. You can’t quite go around just calling anything a One, you have to be certain.

So the module is attached and business proceeds without interruption. The machine spits out Ones and Zeroes like it’s supposed to, like it always has and supposedly always will, a binary system choosing between two options. Yet, anyone who knows a little too much about its inner workings is perfectly aware that the machine’s neat bifurcation isn’t all that neat. Truthfully, the machine has three outputs: One, Zero (with a degree of confidence), and “NULL”. It’s just that the exceptions are caught and sorted into the Zero-category, because that method of handling the machine’s limitations still keeps things running smoothly. It’s not much of an issue at all, and there’s no real need to examine the machine any further.

No need to pay attention to the way its NULL exceptions keep rising in volume.

No need to examine it for any shortcomings, oversights … or any weaknesses.

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

[givemearmstopraywith]

quick palestine fact sheet:

there are nearly 7 million palestinian refugees globally

1.5 million individuals live in the 58 recognized palestine refugee camps around palestine (i.e. in gaza, syria, east jerusalem, etc) recognized by the unrwa

67% of gaza's population are refugees

there are 905,000 registered palestine refugee children: 635,000 in gaza and 269,000 in the west bank

palestinian refugees frequently cannot access public health insurance and are barred from many professions; some areas bar them from education and formal work

in gaza poverty rates are nearly 82% and the unemployment rate is some of the highest in the world at nearl 47% as of august 2022

one recent study showed that 88% of palestinian children show signs of war-related post traumatic stress disorder

37% of adults in the gaza strip qualify for diagnosis for ptsd; however, this number should be approached cautiously, accounting for preconceptions about mental health, access to diagnosis, and hermeneutic injustice: the number is likely far higher

48,000 people in gaza have some form of a disability: more than one fifth of this number are children

palestinians are not allowed, by israeli law, to have citizenship; they have no freedom of movement, and can be subject to forced evictions, detention, and torture.

the per capita gdp of palestine is US$3,678 as of december 2021; this is in comparison to a gdp per capita of USD$52,000 in israel

palestine does not have a formal military. the us stopped aid to palestine, around $60 million, in 2019. palestinian security services receives around $27 million from the national budget.

hamas, a separate entity from the pss, receives around $300 million per year. in comparison, israel spends in excess of USD$23.6 billion annually on their military.

in the midst of disinformation campaigns by global powers, fight facts with facts- and with protests, rallying, donating, elevating the voices of palestinians. keep showing up. keep educating yourself and others. never give up hope. palestine will be free.

[theabigailthorn]

thank god for Girls’ Chat - in the darkest hour, Girls’ Chat is there. Medieval peasant women suffered in silence from a lack of Girls’ Chat, that’s hermeneutical injustice

[librarycards]

What is epistemic violence?

To paraphrase Gayatri Spivak, the coiner of the term, epistemic violence is the systematic silencing of Othered (or, in Spivak's term, subaltern) groups via a refusal of the dominant group to hear them, and to understand their knowledge as legible or hearable at all. The effect of this is that marginal knowledges are iced out of dominant discourse.

More recently, philosopher Miranda Fricker has opened up new paths in this area with her book titled Epistemic Injustice. She describes two forms of epistemic injustice (testimonial, in which a knower's testimony is systematically delegitimized, and hermeneutic, in which a knower is not permitted the language with which to describe the conditions under which they live).

When I talk about epistemic injustice, I am thinking about Spivak and Fricker's more recent interventions. Spivak is also drawing on her reading of Foucault, who used the term "biopower" to describe the productive power of state efforts to make [populations] live (in conditions of silence, marginality, toil, etc.) and let them die (by knowingly abandoning the noncompliant –– including those who do not submit to the epistemic conditions required of them).

[fountainpenchess]

I contend that suicidal people experience both types of epistemic injustice, as well as hermeneutical marginalization. I argue that testimonial injustice is produced by interlocking sanist, suicidist and paternalist views that regard the judgment of suicidal people as irrational, incompetent, illegitimate or alienated and which destroy the suicidal subject's credibility. In that sense, suicidal people's voices are invalidated. Furthermore, as a group, suicidal people lack the conceptual tools necessary to understand their experiences outside the mainstream curative and preventative frameworks and to make them intelligible to others. As we saw above, no matter what model one uses to theorize suicidality, suicide is not considered a valid option and hence is not rendered intelligible or rational. This doesn't mean that suicidal people are not able to develop those analytical tools and don't have the capacity or agency to do so, but simply that there is a scarcity of theories, notions and concepts to help them conceptualize their experience as part of a larger system of oppression rather than an individual problem. To give an example, the fact that a suicidal person finds it difficult to reach out due to a multitude of reasons−fear of negative consequences and stigma, guilt at the idea of leaving their loved ones or "depriving" them from life insurance that doesn't apply in the case of suicide, the conviction they are being selfish or cowardly−demonstrates that it is difficult for suicidal people to conceptualize their personal experience as part of a larger oppressive system that produces violence and discrimination toward suicidal subjects. In addition, this hermeneutical injustice is partly founded on the fact that suicidal subjects experience hermeneutical marginalization. As demonstrated earlier, suicidal people are not (or very rarely) invited to contribute to knowledge construction on suicidality by either the fields of suicidology or critical suicidology. This makes the theorizing of suicidist oppression incredibly challenging for suicidal people, since no existing suicide-related discourses allow one to conceive this form of oppression.

— alexandre baril, suicidism: a new theoretical framework to conceptualize suicide from an anti-oppressive perspective (emphasis mine)

[assaultmystic]

if i had a criticism to make of a short history of transmisogyny, it would be that gill-peterson seems to shy from identifying transfeminised people on the historical record as trans women as a form of hermeneutic injustice, but not from identifying them as queer men - which at points she seems to treat as a matter of course. not approaching these labels with equal caution is an issue imo

the emphasis on the colonial/state apparatus as vehicle of transfeminisation is fantastically useful. her attention to culturally specific identities is particularly careful (it seems to me, an outsider).

still cant help but feel the baby has been thrown out with the bath water in her dismissal of the psychologistic queer theory approach (of which her criticisms are very much warranted). i mean this specifically with regard to the identities of people who would simply call themselves trans women, about whom she often has very little to say. but also more generally

am of the opinion that transmisogyny is in need of a treatment from a multiplicity of discursive fields - in that it transverses them. the rejection of one lens for another in the exploration of the process of transfeminisation, rather than embracing that need for that multiplicity, is a shortcoming. strikes me as academic in a very literal sense (emerges as a rhetorical move as a result of the pressure of the academy)