Why Trans and Queer Theory is Skewed and Unrealistic As we have seen, the trans conversation is currently being driven to a significant extent by theory that is not well grounded in reality, and this is not helpful for improving understanding about trans people and trans issues. So why is this happening? I think it is actually rooted in the environment in which these theories originated. Many popular theories about LGBT people, the nature of gender and so on ultimately have their origins in the academic humanities, particularly philosophy, gender studies, and other related fields. As I have often said before, I believe there is some kind of imbalance in many of these fields, in that certain worldviews and assumptions are currently too dominant, to the exclusion of other useful perspectives. I am not saying that the currently dominant views are always wrong or worthless, but more diversity would be needed to produce a more complete and balanced picture of the truth.
I think this imbalance of perspectives, the superficial cause of the skew in the theories, can be traced to an even more fundamental cause. That would be the split of science away from philosophy. Historically, the roots of what we would consider science today was part of philosophy, called 'natural philosophy'. But by the 19th century, the scientific method had become very well developed, which meant that scientific inquiry became a specialized pursuit, with its own epistemology, its own defined methods of acquiring 25
