Utterly unbelievable: the discourse of ‘fake’ SOGI asylum claims as a form of epistemic injustice

Media and political debates on refugees and migration are dominated by a discourse of ‘fake’ and ‘bogus’ asylum claims. This article explores how this discourse affects in acute ways those people claiming asylum on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity (SOGI). In particular, this article shows how such a discourse of ‘fakeness’ goes much beyond the well-documented often inadequate credibility assessments carried out by asylum authorities. By framing the analysis within the context of the scholarship on epistemic injustice and drawing on a large body of primary and secondary data, this article reveals how the discourse of ‘fake’ SOGI claims permeates the conduct of not only asylum adjudicators, but also of all other actors in the asylum system, including NGOs and support groups, legal representatives and even asylum claimants and refugees themselves. Following from this theoretically-informed exploration of primary data, the article concludes with the impossibility of determining the ‘truth’ in SOGI asylum cases, while also offering some guidance on means that can be employed to alleviate the epistemic injustice produced by the asylum system against SOGI asylum claimants and refugees.