Activists Now Have the Power to Spike Scientific Research They Don’t Like

A significant social-science paper, co-authored by my casual friend Michael Bailey, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Northwestern, was just retracted by the prestigious Springer-network journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. It’s worth looking at exactly why this happened.

On May 23 of this year, the good Dr. Bailey took to social media to state simply: “I have been informed that my paper, with Suzanna Diaz, will be retracted by the publisher.” Springer took this final — and extremely rare — step after several other actions against the academic piece, including the May 16 addition of a short publisher’s note warning readers about the paper and noting that one of its supplementary indices had been removed for ethical reasons. Bailey and Diaz’s article dealt with a relevant and touchy topic — it provided perhaps the best evidence so far for the phenomenon known as rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) — and quite a few activists greeted the paper’s final retraction with confetti.

On Twitter, trans-rights activist “Katy Montgomerie” gleefully announced: “There is no evidence for the existence of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria at all. There’s only two papers on it, both by anti-trans activists. The first was so bad the journal apologized and issued corrections, the second has been retracted.” Montgomerie’s post drew 11,200 likes and — so far — more than 1,700 retweets.

However, as the speed and intensity of that reaction hint, a deeper look at this affair reveals some very troubling patterns. First, simply put, Bailey and Diaz’s paper was not un-papered because they got something wrong: All of their data — which you can review in full here — hold up. Instead, the official reason given for the retraction was a technical administrative concern. So far as I can parse this all out, “questions arose” about whether parents, who cheerfully consented to taking a survey and then consented to having that data used by the surveyors, consented to having that data used in an academic research article.

And, what is the meaning of “is,” Mr. Clinton? It should be noted here that Bailey and Diaz were absolutely up-front about all of this technical stuff, saying early in the piece that “the initial purpose of [our] survey was not for scientific publication, but information gathering for . . . parents with shared concerns” — and also that exactly zero actual parents seem to have ever complained to Springer.

To be fair to the Archives of Sexual Behavior, Springer journals do follow notably strict rules regarding what is called “institutional review board” (IRB) consent. However, as far as I know, no other recent paper has been pulled for an alleged violation at this level. In fact, during a few online debates, Bailey has helpfully provided a whole list of roughly equivalent works that have not been retracted.

All right: enough wordplay. In reality, anyone opening this article knew at once what had happened here. Almost immediately after the Archives of Sexual Behavior published the paper, frantic transgender activists started protesting the journal and threatening boycotts. A May 5 open letter signed by academics, including Marci Bowers of WPATH and What Is a Woman? fame, the director of the Gender and Life-Affirming (GLAM) medical program at Anchor Health, and a former board member of Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ Equality, not only panned Bailey and Diaz’s article but also called for the removal of Archives editor Kenneth Zucker, in favor of “an editor who has a demonstrated record of integrity . . . on trans matters.”

In what would be a death knell for any scientific journal — if actually done, on scale — the scholar-activists threatened to “no longer submit to the journal, act as peer reviewers, or serve in an editorial capacity” until this replacement was implemented. The letter-writing was accompanied by a social-media campaign that the Tennessee Star accurately summed up as: “criticism from transgender activists and allies.” And the activism worked, at least in causing a quick retraction (and, who really knows how long the annoyed-looking Zucker will stick around?).

All of this matters in large part because it keeps happening. Brown University’s Lisa Littman, the first scientist to bring up ROGD — which is an obvious reality, in an era when the trans-identified population has swollen to 3–5 percent of all young people — was similarly targeted after her widely read PLOS ONE paper discussing the topic. The paper caused an “explosion” of controversy, after being attacked by activists breathlessly claiming that it had major statistical problems, and it was subjected to a highly unusual “post-publication review of the study’s methods and analysis.”

The paper (unsurprisingly) survived and is now back online with only minor changes made. However, the Tennessee Star noted that a disgusted Littman herself left Brown following the affair, “after the school falsely implied that her 2018 paper on the phenomenon — marked by ‘social or peer contagion’ in friend groups or online communities — had been discredited by its publisher.” Littman and Bailey & Diaz hardly stand as exceptions on this front.

In 2020, one of the best studies that I have ever read on police shootings — a piece from Big Ten psychologists Joseph Cesario and David Johnson, which found that race has almost nothing to do with officer-involved shootings when other characteristics are adjusted for — was temporarily retracted by the authors themselves. They did so after the article was accurately cited by Manhattan Institute firebrand Heather Mac Donald, and a resultant hail of criticism from the left.

Perhaps most remarkably, the 2017 publication of Bruce Gilley’s pro-Western “The Case for Colonialism” in the journal Third World Quarterly led to the resignation of 15 of the journal’s 30-odd editorial-board members, the retraction of both print and online versions of the article, two raging petitions signed by more than 1,000 people, and perhaps a dozen death threats to Gilley himself.

We see Many Such Cases. And in each, this sort of thing represents almost textbook bullying. The strategy behind it can be outlined as follows: First, in the majority of social-science fields dominated by left-wing activists, restrict research into certain topics — using internal review panels, social sanctions, granting patterns, etc. Next, viciously attack the occasional well-done paper on tapu themes that manages to sneak through, getting most such articles pulled or “discredited.” Finally, tell smart heterodox critics of The Tower that ideas such as ROGD — or frequent detransition, or left-wing authoritarianism, or the harms of Covid masking — “can’t be taken seriously . . . because there are just no good studies supporting them.”

As it happens, there are solutions on the horizon. I myself am a member of the team working with Lee Jussim at the Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (JOIBS), and we plan to re-run Bailey and Diaz’s article in full in the very near future. The threatening letter to the Archives of Sexual Behavior that I describe above was at least partly countered by a supportive missive, with dozens of signatories, from the Foundation against Intolerance and Racism — with whom I have also worked. For that matter, after a bit of time on the cross, Gilley’s famous article was reprinted in full by the pro-free-speech journal Academic Questions.

However, as we wait for new and perhaps more trustworthy experts and leaders, it’s more than fair that we keep a dubious weather eye trained on the old ones — a new cast of mind that probably was not a case of “rapid onset” for most of us.

Editor’s note: This article originally referred to an IRB as an “internal review board” instead of an “institutional review board.”