I should be practicing

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

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!!"

OR

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

etc etc etc