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.
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