Who is allowed to know? Who is allowed to claim that they know? Who is allowed to decide what knowing is?
My MA Philosophy research at GCAS has to do with epistemology, knowledge itself. Specifically, I look at the
processes of knowledge production and knowledge-as-authority. What happens when a group’s epistemic denial is so
deep they are not allowed to know, to produce knowing, or to possess knowledge-authority? How has feminist work
tried to produce knowledge, and where has it gone wrong? These are some of the burning questions which I wrestle
with in my classes at GCAS and in the first 6,000 words of my GCAS dissertation that are already written.
I am a woman, but a woman denied knowledge itself.
Why do we choose to struggle? Why did I choose that my struggle would be knowledge itself? If you can figure that
second one out, you can understand why I chose GCAS. Let me paint a yellow brick road to get you there a little easier,
even as I not-so-secretly contemplate the irony of offering my readers an easier path to the answer in an argument about
knowledge and struggle.
Like all my sisters – fellow women who share the specific gender marginalisation of not being assigned female at birth
– I am denied knowledge of who I am. This denial reaches throughout history and into the current day. My BA thesis
centred on precarity and epistemic denial for trans women and found the relatively unsurprising answer that precarity
and epistemic denial for trans women are interlinked, stacked, and co-constitutive.
At the time I found GCAS, I wanted to be a professor – I still do. I had already found a Master of Science I was going to
do no matter what, at University College Dublin (UCD) – and I had to choose between two programmes there. For
UCD, I had applied to both International Political Economy and Gender, Politics, and International Relations. Then, and
it doesn’t matter how, I found out about GCAS. The way this institution presented itself spoke to something deeply
embedded in me. Not just intellectually but also, somehow, deeper. A cooperative institution where knowledge and
equity are shared and those who are seeking knowledge, even as students, are recognised as researchers? That deeply
spoke to me.
I wanted someone or some place to see me as a knower – GCAS provided both. The early conversations I had with
Chancellor Creston Davis were fundamental to my journey as someone who knows and someone who produces
knowledge. One such conversation was when he told me an MA in Philosophy is the perfect time to “get experimental”
and “roll the dice” with my research, rather than sticking to what I already knew and colouring within the lines of the
research methods I was taught in my BA at a more traditional institution.
I now have my MSc in Gender, Politics, and International Relations. I deeply cherish the connections I made at UCD,
but the experience I had there felt largely… transactional. It felt like my degree there was a means to get me a diploma
in exchange for a lot of student loan money from the US government. The people at UCD were lovely, my thesis
adviser there was amazing, and I made friends. I will always be grateful for my time at UCD but it wasn’t what I was
looking for as a knower.
Why GCAS? Because here my research and my knowledge aren’t gated by departmental agendas, professors who have
been coercively trained into valuing the existing answer over the process of finding answers, or by physical borders or
what my passport says.
Of course, doing a dual, concurrent, full-time set of master’s programmes is a lot for anyone to try and take on. Once I
got to Dublin for my UCD Master’s and had some rough patches with evictions and both housing and job insecurity, my
ability to continue to complete classes at GCAS that academic year effectively became nil. This was a material setback
but not an intellectual one. At least, not in the way it would be if I had been studying at a “normal” institution.
The way GCAS’ tuition model works and the way they set up their classes both worked in my favour when this setback
happened. I already had time above and beyond the initial 12 months of the programme in case I needed it, and the
people at GCAS were entirely understanding when I reached out and briefly explained what was going on. While I
couldn’t wholly solve my personal job loss or the Irish housing crisis, GCAS allowed me space to continue to struggle
with knowledge and authority.
For now, I’ve been snapped back from the safety and tolerance of Ireland to the very unsafe and intolerant political
radiation of the United States.
While I don’t see the US as my home in any meaningful capacity and people like me have been written out of the social contract to a point where we, as my colleague Jane Brigham once wrote, “are no longer American in any way that
matters”, I am back inside the United States. My country of origin, such as it is, has decided it gets to know who I am –
even if that knowledge is incorrect. It has decided to try and enforce such false knowledge onto me and my ability to be
in this world. If I lose my passport, it gets stolen, or something else happens to it, that same government will issue me
an incorrect one.
I remember when a US State Department spokesperson wrote to me in an email due to my official capacity as a
journalist, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes: male and female. Government identity
documents, including passports and visas, must reflect the individual’s biological sex at birth.” Spoiler alert: a lot has
changed since I was born. I no longer weigh 10 pounds or have brown hair, for example.
In contrast, the EU’s highest court correctly recognises the right for trans women and trans people broadly to have
correct identification, including passports.
Being back on US soil is my ashes. It is the ashes of everything I had worked for in the form I thought that work was
supposed to take. My physical and material position is worse, but my intellectual one does not have to be. Before I flew
back to the USA, a move that felt like losing everything, I attended the GCAS Florence Seminars this year. And I didn’t
attend alone. My uncle Lance and my service dog Biscuit were there too. It was the trip of a lifetime for Lance, a
rekindling of the light for me, and the fourth country Biscuit’s been to.
One of the nights in Florence, at the graduation reception dinner, I texted one of my Irish friends, “F*ck, do I want to do
my PhD at GCAS?” That moment felt like choosing my struggle anew.
At the time, I had gotten into a different PhD but without funding at a different university. That lack of funding made it
impossible for me to stay in Ireland and do my dream PhD.
That one particularly colourful word I had texted my friend represented many things for me. The university’s motto is
“From the ashes, a new light”. From the ashes of my plan to do a funded PhD in Ireland and stay out in Ireland for four
more years, I found a new light at GCAS. It was the same light GCAS has been kindling for years, but it is one I needed
to be reminded of. GCAS represents what it claims to.
So, why do we struggle? I don’t know – and I’d be overstating my claim as a philosopher if I said I did. What I can tell
you is why I struggle. I struggle towards the light of hope. Hope for a better tomorrow, generally. Specifically, I hope
for a world where women like me are no longer denied epistemics. I struggle in the hope, however naïve, that another
human will see my work and feel… something. I struggle because it is the work I have set for myself and it is worth it.
Generating new epistemological frameworks is something no AI or chatbot could ever do. And maybe it is something I
will fail to do. I am only human, after all. But the value is in the fight, not merely the outcome.
I have since worked with GCAS faculty on refining and making an application with a new PhD proposal centred on
hope and political capacity. Flying to the US wasn’t a return home geographically but it may just lead to my return
home intellectually.
This article reflects the author’s own views without aiming to represent GCAS’s position as a whole.