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.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
2 comments
July 6, 2022 at 7:35 am
tildeb
There is a great big circle jerk going on by trans activists and their collaborators who have assembled the argument that ‘affirmation only’ is based on ‘medical’ recommendations. The ‘medical’ recommendations are assembled by biased WPATH directors for ‘guidelines’ that use only data that seem to support transitioning and rejects any and all contrary data on the basis that it is not ‘medical’ data. Then laws are changed to affirmation only because this is the ‘medical consensus’, professional duty of care is changed to affirmation only because this is the ‘medical consensus’, various Colleges of medical practices change their guidelines to affirmation only because this is the ‘medical consensus’, and then refer any and all legitimate criticisms of affirmation only – you know, reality – to be ‘against the scientific consensus’ so therefore any and all criticism is defined into being bigotry and bias and hatred.
This is what ideological capture MEANS in practice: the ideology is promoted by captured institutions and organizations over and above and REGARDLESS of its real world effects that caused by its implementation. This is why gender ideology is like a religious belief in that it survives ONLY by faith-based confidence – not evidence from reality – that the ideology is true. And so all other ‘beliefs’ are blasphemous and come from blasphemers who moral character is therefore to be not just doubted by ejected from participation for their sins. And it ‘works’ only if one first believes that a ‘gender-based identity’ is floating around inside physical bodies but separate from it… you know, just like a ‘soul’. And we ALL want to align this gender identity soul with its host body, don’t we? DON’T WE?
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July 6, 2022 at 5:39 pm
cara ryan
Most of these “experts” exist due-to an incestuous political and economic-donor, pay-to-play relationship with governments being their gravy boat anyway. THAT is the process (especially in the corrupt U.S. system) responsible for why this total assault on human sensibility got into the halls of power so brazenly without a democratic, public referendum exposing it.
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