If you're making a progressive point that you know is right - there's not a correlation between transness and being a sexual predator, violent crime is not caused by race, sex work and receiving a sex worker's services should be decriminalized, etc etc etc - and someone gets that sparkle in their eye and says "I KNEW you'd say that and I have THIS" and slaps down a scholarly article or a survey or other scientific study, which appears to support their thesis, it is important not to panic and fold. Especially if you're in a nonlinear text-based conversation.
You have time to read that shit before you respond. ACTUALLY read it, because the person who sent it to you almost certainly didn't.
You don't have to immediately fall back from your position and cede ground on the basis that "oh your article says XYZ and okay, that may be true, but--"
You must remember the following:
People with backwards, hateful agendas can also do science and write papers in support of those agendas, and frequently do. Because someone has to be responsible for laundering bad ideas through the appearance of a scientific process to make them appear legitimate for everyone else to use.
People can publish papers which come to wrong conclusions based on faulty procedure or cherry-picking data, and upon reading their work critically and giving it some thought, you may be able to spot the places where they put their finger on the scale. Others in their field may have already peer-reviewed and panned their work. Thanks to the magic of the internet, that does not stop it from being spread by bad actors desperate for anything that lends legitimacy to their pre-existing beliefs.
People with unserious and unscientific biases about the world love to appeal to the authority of science, by citing the one survey they could quickly find of 500 participants which appears to support their thesis
The person who slapped this down triumphantly on the imaginary table almost certainly HAS NOT read their own evidence critically or put the necessary thought into it. They googled "[violently misanthropic belief] scientific study," skimmed until they found something that appeared to come to a conclusion that supports their thesis, and called it a day
My favorite example to go to is always a SWERF who threw an article at me that she clearly thought was a Checkmate move, and it was a survey of about ~1000 sex workers that concluded decriminalization wasn't the answer. I've brought this up before but I'm going to point out once again the issues my Community College Dropout ass could even spot:
1000 is generally a pretty good sample size but sex workers is a big, diverse group. Is 1000 a big ENOUGH sample size to be meaningful?
The study gives exact percentages for some of its findings, but when it comes to the difference between "Sex workers who said they would feel safer with decriminalization" and "sex workers who did not feel safer with decriminalization" suddenly we're talking about "over half" of them not feeling safer because of decrim. Which could literally mean 51% and I strongly suspect that it does.
Once satisfied that their survey results indicated sex workers as an overall population agree with their thesis that decrim is no good, the scientists do not ask the group who were pro-decrim about their stance and why they feel that way. They are solely concerned with the reasons why decrim might not be the answer to some people.
One does have to stop and think about the context in which the survey was even brought into our conversation. A sex worker said decriminalization would make his life safer and easier. A SWERF hates that idea, and brought out this article as proof of why she's right and the SW is wrong. Someone who is literally talking to a sex worker, the person she is ostensibly concerned about protecting, and saying "some scientists interviewed a bunch of sex workers and concluded that over half of them disagreed with you, so checkmate, you are wrong about your own experiences and I trust this paper to tell me about your life better than you" to dismiss the actual sex worker.
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