Enlightenment

This conception of empiricism—what it means to do “good,” “reliable,” and “valid” science—constrains what work can be done in the future. The exclusions “necessitated” by these models of research aren’t an accident either—broadly speaking, the conception of rationalism underpinning the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment came out of white, Western, bourgeois and aristocratic thought. Also, the scientific and social scientific paradigm that reigns in university research (and in much of the private, state-sanctioned research programs) says that many types of studies require a certain-sized subject population in order to claim statistical validity. So studies about, say, queer people or trans people, or queer trans people, are often thwarted by the comparatively smaller numbers of folks who a) feel comfortable being out to a group of strangers in a clinical environment, b) feel comfortable exploring potentially sensitive issues in the context of their unequal status as a research subject, c) even believe in this type of research, and d) are targeted by researchers’ advertisements or happen to see such adverts.