embracing the patterned ambiguity of gender and sex as more or less social constructs can grant you so much more precision in thinking about so many concepts in science.
like, if there was a study (and I'm just making this up as an example) showing women suffer from mosquito bites more than men do
you could do the ~"Gender Critical"~ thing and go "see!? mosquitoes get it!!"
you could go "that's interesting" and start asking more questions, like:
- is this data self-reported? controlled?
- were they studying the women or the mosquitoes?
- did the study use methods that would let you tell the difference between "being bitten more often" and "noticing bites more often"?
- did the study include any trans people and were their results any different? if yes were they on HRT or not?
- how similar were the men and women in aspects other than gender? do we know their social class, jobs, diets, blood types?
because in fact the study i made up just then could lead to a huge variety of conclusions. from my description above you can't tell the difference between studies that show:
- mosquitoes are attracted to people with higher estrogen levels
- mosquitoes are opportunistic and women spend more time near mosquito habitats for sociocultural reasons
- every gender gets bitten about the same amount but men are socialised to pay less attention to physical discomfort so more of them don't notice minor bites compared to women (and by more we mean like 60-40, this is a bell curve thing)
- we accidentally got heaps of women in the study that have the mosquito's favourite blood type and not so for the men, oops
- mosquitoes are attracted to people with more x and y in their diets, which is currently mostly women for, again, largely sociocultural reasons
you're just not going to understand actual Gender Science, and therefore reality, if you can't put "hmm, but what do they mean by woman this time" in your mental toolkit in a relatively neutral way.
