Nick Clanchy (McGill University), “Infrapolitical Strategies for Preventing Hermeneutical Injustices Amidst the Global Trans Panic”

Forthcoming, Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy

By Nick Clanchy

Q: “Infrapolitical Strategies for Preventing Hermeneutical Injustices Amidst the Global Trans Panic” – that’s a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it?

A: I know – I’m sorry! If you’re looking for something a bit more poetic, can I recommend my epigraphs?

Q: Well, perhaps you could begin by breaking the title down? To start with, what are ‘hermeneutical injustices’?

A: Sure! A hermeneutical injustice is a kind of epistemic injustice. When you suffer a hermeneutical injustice, an interest you have in something about yourself being intelligible to someone goes unfairly unsatisfied, for a particular kind of reason. This is that you have at best ill-fitting concepts available to you for the purpose of rendering this thing about yourself intelligible to the person in question, at least in part as a result of hermeneutical marginalization. A group is hermeneutically marginalized in this sense insofar as it is excluded from and/or subordinated within practices which generate and/or propagate concepts. Examples of such hermeneutically powerful practices include the arts, journalism, academia, and the law. (Probably you’re a member of the relevant hermeneutically marginalized group – but as I’ve argued elsewhere, this isn’t strictly necessary.) In this paper my focus is on hermeneutical injustices suffered by trans people in their interactions with cis people. Think here of trans people struggling to get cis friends or romantic partners to grasp that they are indeed trans, or to get cis doctors to grasp that they ought to be provided with gender-affirming healthcare, or to get cis academic colleagues to grasp that their research on trans topics constitutes worthwhile philosophy. Such difficulties are frequently explained by our cis interlocutors turning out to lack key concepts, such as nonbinary, or to be liable to draw different and detrimental sets of inferences from those concepts’ employment – where this is in turn at least in part a result of trans people’s hermeneutical marginalization. The question I set out to answer is: how can such hermeneutical injustices be prevented?

Q: I take it you think the ‘global trans panic’ complicates this question somewhat?

A: Unfortunately yes, indeed I do. First, let me say something how the existing literature thinks about preventing hermeneutical injustices. All previously proposed strategies are in fact of the same basic sort: they take for granted the interests people have in certain things about themselves being intelligible, and aim at enabling them to satisfy these interests – usually by making well-fitting concepts available to them for this purpose. Examples include fighting for greater participation in hermeneutically powerful practices for hermeneutically marginalized groups, and engaging in political activism. Now, trans people have long pursued such interests-as-given strategies – at times with considerable success. Yet the anti-trans backlash currently ongoing around the world has brought to the fore a number of limitations and downsides to our pursuit of such strategies. In particular, limits have been placed on the effectiveness of our pursuit of such strategies by the anti-gender ideology movement’s dogged engagement in hermeneutical sabotage. That is, a coalition of transphobic forces have increasingly been undermining trans people’s efforts to get cis people to work with trans-inclusive concepts by doing their utmost to get cis people to work with trans-exclusive concepts instead. At the same time, trans people’s pursuit of such strategies has plausibly inadvertently contributed to our growing hypervisibility – which in turn has plausibly helped expose the most vulnerable amongst us to unprecedented levels of anti-trans violence. Now, I don’t think this means trans people ought to refrain from pursuing interests-as-given strategies – far from it, in fact. But I do think it means we ought to question whether these are the only strategies it's possible to pursue.

Q: I’m guessing this is where ‘infrapolitical strategies’ come in?

A: Here’s where we get to my positive proposal, yes. Progress can be made by asking why trans people have interests in certain things about ourselves being intelligible to cis people in the first place. I suggest that often, trans people only have such interests because only then will the relevant cis people provide us with a needed good – whether this be a material good like gender-affirming healthcare or a social good like love. It follows that by meeting these underlying needs for ourselves through practices of mutual aid, trans people can do away with at least some of the interests we have in certain things about ourselves being intelligible to cis people, and thus with the possibility of these interests’ unfair non-satisfaction. Such interests-in-question strategies for preventing hermeneutical injustices are infrapolitical, in the sense that they play out within a marginalized group rather than between a marginalized group and a dominant group. I argue that especially in the context of a backlash against a marginalized group by a dominant group such as the global trans panic, this is a significant advantage for strategies of this previously untheorized sort. I’d add that strategies of this sort are also notably more materialist in spirit than most previously proposed strategies for preventing hermeneutical injustices.

Q: Finally, suppose I’m not especially invested in the epistemic injustice literature; what does your paper have to offer me?

A: Well, in addition to making the main argument just described I also go on a number of side-quests which might be of interest. For instance, I offer some thoughts on what it would mean to develop a truly social epistemology. I suggest that if philosophers tend to be decidedly optimistic about the value of generating and circulating knowledge (as for instance Nietzsche argues in §6 of Human, All Too Human), then this optimism is sometimes cruel in Lauren Berlant’s sense. And I propose a possible affinity between a Wittgensteinian philosophical methodology and an anarchist politics, insofar as both call on us to work together to satisfy our real needs (on which point, see respectively §108 of the Philosophical Investigations and e.g. Peter Kropotkin’s canonical The Conquest of Bread). I also hope to prompt readers to reflect on what they can do to make the world more hospitable for trans people in this political moment – beginning perhaps by addressing the sorry state of our own profession.