(CW: Altered states/psychosis/reality shifting. The discussion is academic and contains minimal details of our or anyone else's psychotic episodes, but I know the topics can be triggering nonetheless. Also, brief mentions of abuse.)
It is bad enough when one's self-knowledge is wobbly, thanks to the relentless exposure to people and situations that degrade one's ability to recognise oneself as a valid knower. Racism and sexism (which includes misogyny, homophobia and transphobia) are the commonest of these self-knowledge-destroyers; ableism, xenophobia and classism play a similar role. This is what we've experienced as a Black, transmasculine, disabled plural system. Everywhere we look, we marginalised people are told that our self-knowledge is invalid, that it is impossible for a marginalised person to step outside their experience and analyse a situation objectively and logically. It is, in short, the presumption that to be marginalised is to be less intelligent or rational. This hostility towards one's capacity to know oneself and understand one's experiences logically is called 'epistemic injustice', an idea introduced by the philosopher Miranda Fricker in 2007, in a book by the same name.
( Cut for mentions of abuse and psychosis, though with few details of either. )
It is bad enough when one's self-knowledge is wobbly, thanks to the relentless exposure to people and situations that degrade one's ability to recognise oneself as a valid knower. Racism and sexism (which includes misogyny, homophobia and transphobia) are the commonest of these self-knowledge-destroyers; ableism, xenophobia and classism play a similar role. This is what we've experienced as a Black, transmasculine, disabled plural system. Everywhere we look, we marginalised people are told that our self-knowledge is invalid, that it is impossible for a marginalised person to step outside their experience and analyse a situation objectively and logically. It is, in short, the presumption that to be marginalised is to be less intelligent or rational. This hostility towards one's capacity to know oneself and understand one's experiences logically is called 'epistemic injustice', an idea introduced by the philosopher Miranda Fricker in 2007, in a book by the same name.
( Cut for mentions of abuse and psychosis, though with few details of either. )
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