Many trans and queer kids only figure out that they are trans or queer far into their adulthood. For them, for us, it often is a matter of recognizing the truth that always lingered in the shadows. Shadows thrown by a lacuna of understanding that there are concepts that can explain our experiences, emotions and desires. Too often our caregivers do not possess the epistemic tools to help us understand. Yet, sometimes they do and still they stay silent when we seek them out. This is, I argue, a hermeneutical injustice (Fricker 2007) and a case of willful hermeneutical silence. Our communication attempts fail not because of ignorance (Pohlhaus, Jr. 2012, Dotson 2011) but because our caregivers choose not to take up our bids for meaning seeking. We are, thus, shunted from speaking on and understanding sex and gender as equals with our endo-cisgender-heterosexual-allosexual-alloromantic peers who can speak freely about these matters and whose words easily find uptake. In the best case this only leads to failed communication attempts with the people who ought to help us understand. In the worst case some of us might suffer hermeneutical death or near death (Medina 2017).

It has recently been argued that testimony’s epistemic role exceeds the exchange of propositional knowledge (Hazlett 2025; Hills 2020; Fraser 2021; Sliwa 2023; Malfatti 2024): speakers can change not only what but how we think about some topic. For example, by influencing what we attend to, what we take as significant, the associations we make, and the inquiries we embark on.

In the literature, it’s implicitly assumed these cases involve some kind of epistemic dependence, beyond dependence for knowledge (Ibid). What’s unclear, however, is how to make sense of this: what is the nature of this dependence? More specifically, what precisely does the hearer depends on the speaker for? What is the relationship between the speaker’s utterance and the hearer’s resulting epistemic states or conduct? In what sense, if any, is the hearer taking the speaker’s word for something?

This article has two aims: 1) to elucidate the problem and lay out some desiderata for an adequate answer, and 2) to offer a tentative solution: at least in some cases, speakers issue indirect directives – to compare two things, to explore the implications of applying a certain concept to a situation – and recommend following these as epistemically fruitful.

When epistemologists turn their attention to the problem of remedying epistemic injustice and wrongdoing, they typically pursue forward-looking strategies. Such strategies are designed to reduce the number of new wrongs committed in the future, and aim to bring epistemic practice closer to an ideal state. In contrast, I will discuss a fresh, backward-looking design for avoiding epistemic wrongdoing and restoring epistemic agency, whose purpose is not to bring epistemic practice closer to an ideal state, but rather seeks to improve or mitigate the non-ideal epistemic environment by redressing and forgiving epistemic wrongdoing that has occurred in the past. Such a backward-looking strategy is explicitly focused on the victim's past suffering and its epistemic redress and thus, I argue, is more appropriate for remedying inclusionary forms of epistemic injustice and wrongdoing such as epistemic exploitation (Berenstain 2016), epistemic appropriation (Davis 2018), “appreciative” silencing (Tobbi 2022) and hermeneutical excess (Dular 2023).

Fig leaves such as “I’m not a racist but” or “I’m not transphobic but” represent pervasive yet insidious rhetorical devices, obscuring the impropriety of other utterances. On a common understanding, championed by Jennifer Saul and others, fig leaves block hearers from forming beliefs about the impropriety of the target utterance. I challenge this understanding on two grounds: first, it overlooks the varied epistemic impact of fig leaves, and second, it doesn’t capture how fig leaves are evidentially devious. To address these shortcomings, I propose a revised account. On my view, fig leaves are evidentially inert on their own while having an evidential effect when paired with flawed background beliefs. As a result, they often yield irrational credences regarding the impropriety of the target utterance. Based on this proposal, I discuss some strategies for resisting the pernicious effects of fig leaves.