Reminder that 'scientist' and 'communicating science to the masses' is not the same job or skill set.

My partner is a scientist, she spends all day doing science. It involves lab work, writing papers, making supercomputer clusters to very clever things and meetings...

...it isn't the job of scientists to make you understand science.
Nor is it untrained journalists and op ed writers, though they seem to think it is.
Unfortunately our society doesn't teach science well, or spread scientific information well.

And look at the shit we are in

So here is some advice.

1) what you were taught in high school science was super simplified. And is also, possibly, years or decades out of date by this stage.

2) "studies show" means nothing without referencing what studies, by whom. You can run a highlighter over any womens health magazine and find this phrase used over and over again. No references to the studies. It is dangerously misleading.

3) politicians always have an agenda that is pretty much never your wellbeing. If they are trying to sell you some information as science, look for the source before swallowing it.

4) someone being a scientist gives no inherent value to what they say is scientifically true. Their work must be peer reviewed and published in a journal that is also respected.

A lot of TERFs, for example, link to discredited works supported by sham institutes.

5) you can access scientific papers online. The authors of the paper can then be googled. That gives you context.

Hope that helps.

Remember, science is about questioning. Not just the theories and beliefs we have, but the hypothesis, but the methods, the data, the conclusions made from that data... everything.

Scientific understanding changes over time because we learn more. You need to stay up to date.

"But that is just science"

-science when?
-by whom?
-do their peers agree?
-has there been other studies that refute or replicate the findings?
-has new discoveries changed the way we look at earlier data?

Get what I am saying?