Could you provide a direct quote where they explicitly say that the intent is to create confusion as opposed to challenge an incorrect norm? I've never seen that.

In some sense, everything beyond mathematical statements is a lie because you can never really be accurate enough to cover every detail.

And then we have the question of whether statements are intended to be definitional in nature or informative. If someone says "gender is a social construct" do they mean "I define gender to be exclusively that part of the observed dimorphism between men and women that is arbitrary and determined by culture"? Or do they mean, "whatever 'gender' means to you, by any standard definition, it's all the product of culture alone"? If I argue, am I arguing the utility of a definition (e.g. does "racism" mean "racial bigotry/prejudice" or does it mean "racial bigotry/prejudice backed up by current and historical power"--this is an argument about definitions, not about the attitudes people can have about each other), or am I arguing the reality (e.g. does "borderline personality disorder" have a sensible biological clinical definition, or is purely within the normal spectrum of cognitive behavior and simply gives a clinical-sounding name to "you're a jerk a lot of the time")?

So for me, when people say "gender is a social construct", I am on alert for possible nonsense, but I don't know what to say.

* If they mean "gender is in part socially constructed", well, yeah. Good point! It is in part. No doubt about that. Maybe it's relevant for whatever else they're saying that we should consider that this part of gender might really be totally arbitrary (and we should choose something else if that way to structure it is causing problems).

* If they mean "all differences in non-reproductive behavior between men and women are solely the consequence of cultural indoctrination", then I think absent a really really compelling set of evidence to the contrary, the admittedly not-quite-airtight set of evidence we do have is that this is nonsense, and pernicious nonsense at that (in that it leads to harming people by insisting that who they are is a lie).

* If they mean "I define gender to be purely social", then as long as they don't then try to argue for something "sex"-based by conflating "gender" (their definition) and "sex", that's cool...but usually they do immediately make that conflation, at which point I will object to the conflation, and probably point out that if they didn't try to make gender be exclusively social by definition, but rather be the social expression of sex including innate and culturally-induced features, they wouldn't have gotten themselves into that particular fallacy.