Creating a purposefully bad paper does not invalidate the discipline-- It just highlights how bad the submission review process is. Other academics have done basically the same thing (create a purposefully farcical paper, submit it, have it pass review, then call the reviewers on it) for other subjects.
Take for instance, this go-around involving a fake philosophy paper.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/04/16/spoof-ethics-academic/#.WSMoZjfgW00This paper, and the people who created it, are not directly attacking the discipline of gender studies. Instead, they are inoculating the discipline against poor quality work, by drawing attention to the lack of quality standards in the review process.
The thing these gender studies people should be defending is the discipline, not a purposefully bad paper. They should be defending their discipline by demanding the very same better standards on acceptance that the spoof paper was created to highlight the lack of.
Instead, they are flocking to support an unsupportable paper-- why? Again, my supposition is that those seeking to support the unsupportable paper are those that seek to use the same bad review process to publish utter contemptable garbage for their on purposes/gain, rather than to further the actual discipline as a social science.