Conceptual Erasure and Logical Silencing: Voices in the Void

In Judith Butler's recent work, "Who’s Afraid of Gender (2024)," a compelling passage (p.106) captures the essence of a struggle faced by many within the queer and trans community. Butler articulates the bleak reality for individuals whose lives and identities are marginalized due to the lack of language and community acceptance:

“If a queer or trans kid seeks to live, if a girl assigned male at birth seeks to change the gender expectations made of her, if a boy assigned female at birth is seeking to affirm his life, and there is no language or community in which these lives can be affirmed, they become the waste expelled from the human community, and their sexuality and their gender become the unspeakable. Heteronormativity becomes mandatory, backed by law or doctrine, forming the horizon of the thinkable, the limits of the imaginable—and the livable."

This concept resonates deeply with the notion of hermeneutical injustice, a term Miranda Fricker coins in "Epistemic Injustice (2007)," to describe a situation where a lack of terminology prevents individuals from understanding and communicating their experiences, making it next to impossible to make sense of their lived experiences. Fricker's example of women who, upon sharing experiences of sexual harassment, found themselves without the language to articulate their plight, mirrors the experiences Butler describes. Before these women could name their harassment, they were ostracized, deemed overly sensitive for not "lightening up" or being able to take a joke.

What Butler describes about the experiences of queer and trans kids works with the same idea, namely that not having terminology available to the community to express one’s lived experiences erases them. Unlike the case Fricker describes where the terminology had to be created to make sense of the harassment experienced by women, the terminology for queer and trans kids is available, even if only recently created. What Butler criticises with modern society, however, is the resistance to adopt the terminology and accept the way people make sense of their life. Even more damaging, it’s the call to eradicate the terminology altogether, with governments now censoring books on critical theory. This is not only erasing identities, but actively silencing them.

Now, this leads me to consider that we are facing yet another form of epistemic injustice, closely related to hermeneutical injustice, which I propose to call “conceptual injustice.” Conceptual injustice occurs when someone is wronged by being denied the vocabulary necessary to express their lived experiences. Beyond this, I suggest an even deeper layer of epistemic injustice that cuts further than the mere availability of concepts. This I term 'logical injustice' (Mangraviti 2023), which operates at the level of coherence within one’s experiences. The absence of appropriate concepts not only renders the sexuality and gender of trans and queer individuals unspeakable but also "un-reasonable." It’s not merely that their experiences cannot be expressed; they cannot be reasoned with, and thus, cannot be coherently integrated into their sense of self.

The stakes of this discussion are high. Without the ability to express and reason through one's experiences, individuals are not just silenced; they are systematically excluded from the discourse that shapes human understanding and community. This form of injustice doesn't just deny queer and trans individuals their voice; it denies them their very place in the world. It becomes clear that the fight for epistemic justice is not just about finding the right words. It's about affirming the coherence of the experiences of those marginalized by societal norms, ensuring that every individual has the language and the logical space to make their lives coherent and heard.

References:

Butler, Judith. Who’s Afraid of Gender? London: Penguin Random House UK, 2024.

Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Mangraviti, Franci. “The Contribution of Logic to Epistemic Injustice.” Social Epistemology, December 13, 2023, 1–13.