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I understand that your intention with this post isn't anything as simple-minded as "this genius came out as trans, therefore trans is legit and TERFs should shut their mouths". But even if you're not doing that, some people may take it that way, and I see similar arguments for all kinds of political stances all the time, so I'm going to lay out here why the argument is fallacious.
Years ago, Scott had a post arguing that brilliant people also holding some very strange (and presumably incorrect) beliefs is precisely what you'd naively expect. A genius (broadly defined) is a person who identifies actionable patterns that no one else has noticed before, which means that they must have an unusually sensitive pattern-matching ability, which can very easily devolve into fully-fledged apophenia if left unchecked:
To Scott's examples I'll add the laundry list of mathematicians who went mad, including Alexander Grothendieck, Kurt Gödel and John Forbes Nash among others.
"This extremely smart person is also trans" is not a persuasive argument that we should take the empirical, experiential or normative claims of trans people/trans activists seriously, any more than the argument that no one should eat sugar because Hitler did too, or that we should all be Christian because that student's name? Albert Einstein. If you think the arguments in favour of this or that component of trans rights make sense, it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference if the only people advancing them were the dumbest people you've ever met; if you think they don't make sense, it likewise doesn't make a difference if everyone advancing them got into Harvard on an academic scholarship, is a card-carrying MENSA member and/or has a PhD in theoretical physics. It's Bulverism in reverse.
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