Justdad7 has a great article on how the misuse of statistics and bad studies are being used by the gender religious to support their arguments.  I highly recommend going to his substack and reading the entire article.

The Appeal to Authority

The people who write gender flap-doodle are not stupid. You need to learn a lot of facts in order to twist them and to get your stuff published you need fairly impressive credentials. Any particularly pointed challenge to a piece of gender woo woo from a lay person is likely to be met with the indignant response along the lines of, “How dare you challenge someone who holds a Doctorate from an Ivy League University and publishes in Peer Reviewed Journals.”

This line of argument is a fallacy which has a fancy Latin name, the argument um ad verecundiam or the appeal to authority.

People with doctoral degrees from prestigious universities have to be very bright and hardworking at least at some points in their careers. However, they can still make mistakes and if someone points out a specific mistake, you need to answer the specific point.

A weak or fallacious argument from an expert does not get any better if it is endorsed by lots of other experts. This is the fallacy of argumentum ad numeram or the appeal to popularity. When someone points out that gender affirming care has been endorsed y the American Psychological Association, the American Pediatric Association, the Endocrine Society and many other medical organizations, it is still legitimate to ask whether any of these groups based their endorsement on a systematic evidence review.

The appeal to authority persists because it serves a social purpose. Questioning everything is good advice in the classroom but in day to day life there simply is not time. We need to be able to rely on expert advice without scrutinizing every detail.

Liberal society has developed a matrix of safeguards to ensure that expert advice is reliable, most of the time. Professionals are licensed and regulated by governing bodies. Scientific papers are subject to peer review. Academic tenure protects researchers from undue government and corporate pressure. The press watches for cases of abuse.

The rise of gender ideology has seen all of these safeguards fail simultaneously. It will take time to rebuild them and the loss of public trust will take even longer to undo.