Interesting phraseology there. Truth is truth ... unless it supports "dumb and backwards ideas", in which case it's being twisted and/or cherry picked?
(I'm not picking on your viewpoint in particular; all sides do exactly the same thing.)
(I'm not picking on your viewpoint in particular; all sides do exactly the same thing.)
The problem is that most people bringing this up are not doing so in an intellectually rigorous way. They are coming to the table with a pre-existing conclusion and then trying to fit data to support that conclusion. Both sides do this in fact, and approach / intent matters because doing this creates bias even if people try to stay neutral. That is a poor way to try to discover or talk about the truth. That's what I mean to say.
I have no idea why anyone could think that such a vastly sweeping generalization such as "all sides do exactly the same thing" might be anything other than false, but what is contrasted here is exactly two instances, two sides, in which people are not doing exactly the same thing. There is, on the one hand, the careful presentation of nuanced data in good faith — without a witting ulterior motive — and on the other hand, the selection of data on the basis of its ability to appear supportive of an a priori conclusion, something that can be done unwittingly, but which is just as often done wittingly.
What I found problematic is the phrase "automatically assume every individual in a given group conforms with these trends." In the context of this study, clearly, we all know that not everyone does conform. That's why people will describe men who exhibit typically feminine behavior as effeminate and women who exhibit typically masculine behavior as butch.
The question is what is the relation between statistical typicality and normativity? I would say that statistics carried out responsibly and in a broader context involving causal explanation can greatly aid in distinguishing properties from mere accidents, that is, traits proper to and (formally) causally entailed by a given sex versus traits are not intrinsically related to sex. So in the first case, we may speak of defective males and females. For instance, a male born without a penis or a female born without a uterus are defective in relation to the norm that follows from the sex. This is different than the case of a man or woman without the capacity for speech, where speech is proper to humans by virtue of being human, not something particular to a sex. These stand in opposition to traits that might only deserve a relative ranking (inferior and superior in some respect or in relation to some end, but not defective per se and further still not sex-specific). Similar things may be claimed w.r.t. so-called personality differences.