The thing is though, saying that someone needs to have read widely on a certain subject to be able to criticise it or dismiss it as rubbish does put up unreasonable barriers to criticising or dismissing certain things.
Take Christians vs atheists, for example. The Bible will take you a long, long time to read, but even if you take the Bible out of the equation, there is much, much more Christian literature than atheist literature. How far back do you want people to go? Because once Christianity became the dominant religion in Europe, for hundreds of years there were educated men writing about theology. In the early middle ages, literacy was generally confined to the priesthood, and everything was written in Latin. Bede, who wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the English people around 700 years after the birth and death of Jesus, was considered one of the first scholars to actually write in English, and he was a monk himself. Even in much later centuries, when people were writing in more or less the English of the people and scholarship wasn't necessarily confined to men of the cloth, for a long time writing atheist literature would have been dangerous. Even if you didn't believe in God, actually saying that, or putting it in writing, would be more than your life was worth.
So if all a Christian has to do to criticise Richard Dawkins is read "The God Delusion", which most reasonably quick readers could do in a day, but in order to talk authoritatively about theology Richard Dawkins has to have read everything ever written on the subject, that's a much, much greater hurdle for Richard Dawkins to get over than it is for the Christian.
Now back to gender ideology. No, I haven't read all, or even much, of what Judith Butler, or other self-styled "trans inclusive feminists" have written. The little I have read was arrant/errant nonsense, as Richard Dawkins would say.
All I know is that I don't identify with the concept of "gender" myself, I don't believe I have a gender identity, much less that I share one with trans women, and so for me, every argument in favour of trans women being classed as women and allowed to access women's spaces, when properly deconstructed, comes down to "because it's what they want, and if you don't accept that you're a horrible TERF".
There is no book in the world that is going to convince me that I share any kind of identity with, say, Lia Thomas, or even that if I did, our shared identity would be a good argument for us both being eligible to compete in the same sporting categories. There is no book in the world that is going to convince me that toilets are supposed to match our gender identities and not our sexed bodies. The fact that toilets are only divided into men and women, and not "non binary" or any of the other numerous gender identities that apparently exist, and that men's toilets have urinals for people with penises who pee standing up, whereas women's toilets have sanitary bins for people who menstruate, is good enough for me.
So why would I waste my time reading these books, when the people who wrote them aren't prepared to listen to the other side of the debate anyway? Have they all read Kathleen Stock and Helen Joyce? No, didn't think so.