The Rapid Ideological Retraction of a Scientific Article on Rapid Onset-Gender Dysphoria

Sensible Medicine makes a censored article available

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The Rapid Ideological Retraction of a Scientific Article on Rapid Onset-Gender Dysphoria

By Michael Bailey

My research article “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports of 1,655 Possible Cases” (Diaz & Bailey, 2023a) was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in March 2023. Almost immediately the article was attacked by transgender activists and their allies, ostensibly for methodological and ethical reasons. After an “investigation” by the publisher, the Springer Nature Group, the article was retracted, less than three months later.

In this article, I provide both the specific and general cultural background of my article. I then delineate the post-publication controversy provoked by the article, including its retraction. The purported reasons for retracting the article were not credible, and the actual reasons were likely a combination of ideological bias and business considerations. Finally, I discuss the implications of these events for academic freedom, and specifically, the role of “ethical concerns” in suppressing publications with undesirable or inconvenient content.

Background of the Article

During the past decade there has been immense growth in the number of young persons diagnosed with and treated for gender dysphoria. Increases have been especially large for adolescent girls (Zucker, 2019). For example, the primary clinic in the United Kingdom saw a 5,000% increase in adolescent girls from 2010 to 2022 (Turner, 2022).

Two primary hypotheses have been offered to explain these changes. The first, favored by many online activists who claim to speak on behalf of transgender individuals (e.g., Ashley, 2020), is that increased cultural tolerance of transgender persons has encouraged those wishing to take steps to align their gender expression with their feelings to do so. These steps include social transition–changing pronouns, outward appearance, and overt behavior–and medical transition–receiving cross-sex hormones and surgery to make the body and face look like the sex one prefers to be. According to this explanation, the changes reflect the desirable expression of transgender persons’ rational choices and are overdue. The second hypothesis is that there is a recent epidemic of the false belief among emotionally vulnerable adolescents that they are transgender (Littman, 2018). Furthermore, this belief is socially contagious from peer to peer. The condition affecting adolescents has been called “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) by those who believe the second hypothesis. They include many parents distressed by their children’s declarations that they are transgender, despite having no previous signs of gender dysphoria. These parents are also alarmed by the prospect of their children taking unnecessary, harmful, and irreversible medical steps. Supporters of the ROGD hypothesis also include a growing number of clinicians, researchers, and public intellectuals who find it more plausible than the other explanation.

ROGD is controversial for both scientific and nonscientific reasons. The former is understandable–the increase in adolescent gender dysphoria has been so recent that there has been insufficient time to conduct research. The latter reflects the efforts of many transgender activists and their allies, who are adamantly opposed to the ROGD hypothesis. If the hypothesis is true, then their ideology and activism have been harmful. When the first empirical study investigating ROGD–and finding evidence for it–was published (Littman, 2018), the journal that published it was besieged by complaints, and published a “Statement by PLOS One staff, which stated that

PLOS One is aware of the reader concerns raised on the study’s content and methodology. We take all concerns raised about publications in the journal very seriously, and are following up on these per our policy and COPE guidelines.

Concerns focused on methodological limitations, such as the study’s intentionally biased recruiting method (to see if a sample could be recruited that would show the ROGD phenomena–a “proof of concept” demonstration). These limitations reflected intentional trade-offs rather than mistakes, and they were addressed at length in the article. Nevertheless, the journal required an unnecessary “correction” by the author (Jussim, 2019; Littman, 2019).

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My retracted article also addressed, and found support for, ROGD. The article’s data were collected by Suzanna Diaz, through the website ParentsOfROGDKids.com.

Suzanna is the mother of a young adult whom Suzanna believes has ROGD. “Suzanna Diaz” is a pseudonym adopted for privacy concerns–I don’t even know her real name. I met her in 2018 at a small conference of parents, researchers, and clinicians concerned about adolescent gender dysphoria. She presented preliminary results from the survey, and I encouraged her to publish them. We ultimately collaborated on the article. Suzanna is not an academic, and so she did not seek ethics approval prior to conducting the survey. In the United States, approval is given by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). People conducting research outside of universities and hospitals are not required to obtain IRB approval. This is related to the eventual reason given for retraction. Because I work at a university, I am usually required to get my research approved by an IRB before proceeding. I consulted my IRB about collaborating with Suzanna on a dataset that she had already collected. The IRB administrator confirmed that Suzanna is not required to consult with an IRB and that I could collaborate on a publication provided that the data were deidentified.

Our article contained data from 1,655 parents (or guardians) of youth ages 11– 21 whom parents believed had ROGD. Parents read the following before deciding to participate:

Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) is a new phenomenon that is only now beginning to be recognized.

The so-called "gender clinics" are not forthcoming with information about demographics or mental health issues of clients who seek out their services. Nor do they publish information on patient outcomes.

The task is left up to us, the parents, to seek out this information on our own.

Please help us gain a better understanding of this emotionally devastating and physically traumatizing, yet increasingly-common phenomenon.

Who Should Complete this Survey

If your child

• Had a relatively normal childhood without showing any signs of discomfort with their gender, and

• Suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, decided they identified as the opposite gender, or some other "gender"

Please take the time to fill out this survey. It takes about 10-15 minutes to complete, a bit longer if you write comments (which are very helpful!)

*Don't worry if the survey skips over some questions. It is designed to skip over questions that do not apply to you.

All responses will be kept strictly confidential.

Thank you, ParentsofROGDkids.com

Furthermore, at the end of the survey respondents were told: “We will publish our data on our website when we have a large enough sample to make our results significant.” Thus, no one could reasonably object that survey respondents did not consent to the publication of their deidentified data. I have provided this detail so that the reader can evaluate whether respondents had adequate information to decide to participate.

Our article’s large sample size allowed detection of many strongly significant effects, and our findings were generally consistent with the ROGD hypothesis. Most (75%) of the gender dysphoric youth reported on by their parents were natal females, who appear especially susceptible to ROGD. The gender dysphoric youth had a high rate of preexisting mental health problems, and those problems predated announcement of transgender status by nearly four years. Most children knew other youth who had become transgender around the same time, and this was especially common for females. Most females had taken steps to socially transition; this was half as common among males. Medical gender transition steps were much less common, with about 7% of youths having taken cross-sex hormones (and similar rates for boys and girls). Disturbingly, youths with more mental health problems were especially likely to have socially and medically transitioned. The strongest predictor of both kinds of transition was family referral to a gender specialist. Parents who consulted with specialists usually felt pressured to transition their gender dysphoric children.

Before sending our paper out for review we discussed with the Editor, Kenneth Zucker, the fact that we had not obtained IRB approval, which the journal generally requires. We wrote in our submission materials:

We hope the Editor will consider our manuscript, for the following reasons:

1. The first author is not an academic, and she is not employed by any organization that requires IRB approval to conduct human subjects research.

2. The data have been anonymized, and results are presented in a summary manner. No participant could be identified based on the current manuscript. The dataset analyzed was de-identified, but regardless, data will not be shared. [Note: the Editor requested that we share data “upon reasonable request,” and we agreed to do so.]

3. It is reasonable to assume, based on the nature of the website where the survey was conducted, that participants would not object to the publication of aggregate results. Indeed, they would be eager to know these results. Why else would they participate in a survey? (The survey used to collect data is included with our submission. As previously indicated, identifying information was removed before the data set was analyzed.)

4. The second author was not involved in the survey design or data collection. He learned of these data after seeing the first author present them in a meeting. He suggested to her that they could collaborate on an academic article. This submission is the outcome of that collaboration. The second author is an academic researcher bound by government regulations concerning IRB oversight. Knowing this, he contacted his IRB about this matter, and their correspondence is included on following pages, entitled “Correspondence between J. Michael Bailey and Northwestern IRB administrator [redacted].” [redacted] advised that Northwestern IRB cannot retroactively approve research that has already been conducted. However, [redacted] added that if the dataset analyzed was deidentified, then publishing is “likely fine from an ethical and IRB perspective.” I have previously noted that the data were deidentified.

The Editor agreed with our arguments and sent our paper to anonymous referees for review. Reviewers congratulated us on wading into a controversial topic but were still quite demanding. Our submission was subjected to two rounds of rigorous peer review. The correspondence (i.e., reviews and our responses to them) exceeded 16 single spaced pages. The paper was accepted on Valentine’s Day 2023.

The Controversy and Retraction

The account of subsequent events is history rather than science. And although some details (events, dates, and persons) are available, the most important facts–especially the motivations of actors–are not. I start with what I know, and then add what I believe is true.

Shortly after publication I became aware of pushback against our study. For example, on March 29 “researcher and therapist” Jessica Kant Tweeted “Bailey and Diaz just published what might be the worst methodology I've ever seen. This is truly groundbreaking in all the wrong ways. Bravo.” That Tweet was brought to the attention of Editor Ken Zucker, who forwarded it to me. Sometime in April several academics and activists posted an open letter on the Internet that was “spurred by” the publication of our article (Adams et al., 2023). The letter had 100 signatories, more than half of whom were graduate students. Notable cosigners included: Florence Ashley, a self-described “transfeminine jurist, bioethicist, public speaker, and advocate” (Ashley, 2024), who was removed from the World Health Organization’s transgender health policy panel after her “extreme views” were publicized (Morrison, 2024); Elizabeth Olson, Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at University of Illinois; Jae Puckett, a Michigan State University psychology professor whose entreaties led to cancellation of my scheduled talk there several years ago; Marci Bowers, Past President of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and one of several surgeons who perform “gender-affirming surgeries” (i.e., surgeries to create facsimiles of other-sex genitalia, or to remove female breasts); and Laura King, psychology professor at the University of Missouri. During King’s editorship at Perspectives of Psychological Science, she increasingly nurtured activist scholarship, including Ashley’s on gender identity (Ashley, 2023) and a piece by Steven O. Roberts (2020), whose hyperbolic reactions to its critiques caused a destructive controversy there (Jussim, 2023). To my knowledge no one who believes that Ashley’s and Roberts’ pieces were unworthy of publication–and I am one of those–tried to get them retracted or complained about King’s unscholarly priorities.

In contrast, King and the other cosigners of the letter asserted that our article’s publications “raises serious concerns over research ethics and intellectual integrity.” More important than our article’s alleged defects were those of Kenneth Zucker, the editor who accepted it. The letter’s most prominent demand, with which it closed, was that Zucker be removed as editor of Archives. His alleged sins included both acceptance of articles biased against transgender persons and his clinical approach to treating gender dysphoria. (Zucker was fired from his job directing Toronto’s Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic in 2015 following an “internal review.” He later won a substantial lawsuit against his former employer; Singal, 2016) Because I believe the open letter attacking Zucker and our paper influenced the publisher (Sprinter Nature), I quote from it amply below:

We are writing to express scientific and ethical concerns about the editorial direction of Archives of Sexual Behavior. We are a group of researchers who work in areas that fall under the journal’s scope, including scholars who have previously published there and/or were involved in the journal in an editorial capacity. In recent years, Archives of Sexual Behavior has routinely published articles on LGBTQ+ topics that in our view did not adhere to the highest standards of intellectual integrity and publication ethics, raising concerns over editorial bias. As a result, we have lost confidence in the journal’s editor, Dr Kenneth Zucker.

….

Our letter is spurred by the journal’s recent publication of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases,” authored by Suzanna Diaz & J. Michael Bailey. We believe that the article raises serious concerns over research ethics and intellectual integrity. According to its ethics declaration, the article was published without Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval. IRB approval is a critical part of ensuring respect for research ethics. Dr Bailey’s university IRB “declined to certify the study because data were already collected.” The decision to publish threatens the foundations of research ethics, as it could effectively allow researchers to circumvent IRBs by having an unaffiliated layperson collect data prior to the researcher’s involvement. To ensure respect for the principles of research ethics, journals should generally require IRB approval regardless of where the researcher works. Individuals who do not abide by the research ethics approval process must be denied the institutional legitimacy granted by peer-reviewed publication.

The publication also raises concerns over scientific integrity. Despite mentioning longstanding academic critiques of research around “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” it does not seriously engage with these critiques nor integrate insights drawn from those critiques into the study methodology, replicating the severe methodological and interpretive flaws of previous research. The study is based on a lay survey that “was not for scientific publication” and, by inference, not designed to support robust scientific inferences. In our considered view, it does not meet the standards of quality expected of scientific journals. The recruitment material for the study uses leading and inflammatory language that is thoroughly inappropriate for a scientific study: “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) is a new phenomenon that is only now beginning to be recognized. The so-called gender clinics are not forthcoming with information about demographics or mental health issues of clients who seek out their services. Nor do they publish information on patient outcomes. The task is left up to us, the parents, to seek out this information on our own. Please help us gain a better understanding of this emotionally devastating and physically traumatizing, yet increasingly common phenomenon.” The recruitment material, which actively biases participants by telling them that ROGD exists, should have disqualified the article from consideration at Archives of Sexual Behavior.

….

Routine publication of articles of questionable scientific or ethical quality on LGBTQ+ issues not only undermine our confidence in the journal but also in its editor Dr Kenneth Zucker, given his academic and public positions on LGBTQ+ issues. Dr Zucker’s approach to trans youth care, as described in his publications, seeks to discourage youths from growing up trans (“to reduce the likelihood of [Gender Identity Disorder] persistence”), which we consider to be a form of conversion therapy, and he has testified in opposition to including gender identity in the Canadian federal ban on conversion therapy. While political involvement by clinicians and researchers is laudable, his positions create appearances of bias and conflict of interest in relation to Archives of Sexual Behavior’s recent publication of an article opposing restrictions on conversion therapy and arguing that the practice may be an “important resource for reducing suicide attempts”. Dr Zucker’s editorship is further called into question by his collaborative proximity to individuals and groups who militate against access to gender-affirming care.

….

The severity of our scientific and ethical concerns calls for replacing Dr Kenneth Zucker as editor of Archives of Sexual Behavior. Until an editor who has a demonstrated record of integrity on LGBTQ+ matters and especially trans issues replaces Dr Zucker as editor, we will no longer submit to the journal, act as peer reviewers, or serve in an editorial capacity. We encourage our peers to do the same. If the situation is not remedied in a timely manner, we will consider terminating any involvement with the IASR and with members of Archives of Sexual Behavior’s editorial board.

On May 5, a counter-letter was published in support of Zucker by the group Fair in Medicine, which opposes encroaching identity politics (Mendoza et al., 2023). That letter had more than 1,000 signatories.

Both Zucker and I received questions from both the publisher, Springer Nature Group, and the International Academy of Sex Research (IASR). The IASR is the professional organization associated with the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

On May 10 Springer put a statement on the journal website next to our article indicating that they were aware that methodological issues had been raised and were looking into it.

On May 23 I received an email from someone at the publisher stating:

The Publisher and the Editor-in-Chief have retracted this article due to noncompliance with our editorial policies around consent. The participants of the survey have not provided written informed consent to participate in scholarly research or to have their responses published in a peer reviewed article. Additionally, they have not provided consent to publish to have their data included in this article. Table 1 and the Supplementary material have therefore been removed to protect the participants’ privacy.

Table 1 and the Supplementary material had statements provided by some participants that indicated their political leanings–most leaned Left. We had redacted any identifying information (names, cities, ages, occupations, etc.) and continue to believe no participants could have been identified by what we included.

I conferred with persons with legal and corporate expertise, who helped me craft a stern letter demanding the retraction not proceed (SEGM, 2023). Most importantly, the letter referred to 19 specific examples of survey studies published by Springer Nature that also did not provide “written informed consent to participate in scholarly research or to have their responses published in a peer reviewed article.” (For a more detailed account of my exchanges with Springer, see: SEGM, 2023). After a delay, the article was retracted on June 14.

Regarding the other articles failing to use the informed consent language that Springer insisted was necessary, the retraction letter said: “we thank you for flagging these 19 papers which we are now investigating. We will keep you informed of the outcome of these investigations in due course as per COPE best practice guideline.” I am skeptical that this will happen.

Why Was the Article Retracted?

Retraction is increasingly a vehicle for scientific censorship (Clark et al., 2023). There are few perfect empirical studies, but currently, retraction seems better predicted by an article’s controversial topic than by its methodological flaws. Examples include retracted articles about gender differences (Oransky, 2018; 2020), race and crime (Marcus, 2020a; 2020c), IQ and group differences (Marcus, 2020a; 2024), and gender dysphoria (Marcus, 2020c). Of course, journals and publishers do not admit in their retraction statements that they were cowed by pressure. Nor do they admit that their decisions are politically biased. Sometimes, authors even “ask” for retractions–and this sometimes happens because they are afraid that if they do not, their careers will be harmed.

I believe that Diaz and Bailey (2023a) was retracted because it supported the existence of the syndrome ROGD with data and argument, and this infuriated many activists. Of course, no one involved in the retraction said so directly, not even the activists who wrote the open letter. (These activists focused more on Zucker’s removal as Editor.)

But the purported reasons were not credible. Participants were told the purpose of the study within the section “Who Should Complete This Survey.” Furthermore, at the end of the survey they were explicitly told about the plan to publish the data. Although the initial plan was to publish a summary on the website rather than in an academic article, publishing an academic article (in addition to the website summary) has no implications for protection of human subjects. Publishing is publishing. The retraction did not protect a single participant. Rather, it thwarted the preferences of 1,655 concerned parents, whose data were censored. Consider the hypothetical counterfactual in which our research found strong evidence against the idea of ROGD. I do not for a moment believe that it would have been attacked by the same people; nor do I believe it would have been retracted by Springer Nature. I await even an attempt at a cogent argument that the research study we published harmed any participants. Or that the retraction did not harm them.

I am less certain what was going through the minds of some of the key persons. For example, did the managers from Springer Nature believe that they were retracting the paper to prevent dissemination of information about ROGD? Probably not, exactly. But the Springer Nature Group has become increasingly oriented towards identity politics. For example, Nature Human Behaviour published an editorial advocating limits on academic freedom when research might be construed as finding undesirable differences among human groups (Behaviour, 2022; Savolainen, 2022). The journal Nature has increasingly taken political stands, at the cost of its own credibility (Zhang, 2023). One of the Springer Nature managers who contacted me had a Black Lives Matter symbol in her email, and more than one had pronouns. Perhaps these managers believed they were dispassionate adjudicators of academic ethics. But personal preferences have a way of influencing decisions even when they should not. Publishers evaluating research about politically controversial topics for potential retraction should make special efforts to appear, and be, neutral. These managers did not do so.

Springer Nature may have also been responding to concerns at the IASR, with whom Springer has a business contract. I have learned that the main IASR complainants about our paper were young persons–students and postdocs–on the IASR Executive Board. (I learned this from friends remaining at IASR who have sufficient access to know this.) This is consistent with recent surveys finding that respect for academic freedom has declined markedly in recent generations (Kauffman, 2021; Lott, 2023). In North America and Western Europe, changes have mainly focused on discrimination against politically non-progressive ideas and academics. For example, “4 in 10 US and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter, and 1 in 3 British academics would not hire a Brexit supporter.” “Only 28% of American and Canadian academics would feel comfortable having lunch with someone who opposes the idea of transwomen accessing women’s shelters.” In the U.S., more than one-third of conservative academics and Ph.D. students have ben threatened with disciplinary actions for their views, and 70% of these academics report a hostile departmental climate” (Kauffman, 2021). Consistent with the high number of graduate students cosigning the “Open Letter” against both Zucker and our article, younger academics are especially supportive of firing or censuring scholars whose opinions they find unacceptable.

Aftermath of the Retraction

To the extent that the goal of those supporting retraction was suppressing information about ROGD, this clearly failed. The article-related controversy generated more publicity than for anything I have ever written. Rather than attempt to summarize the various news articles, essays, and blogs, I provide information that Springer Nature collects on academic articles. As of August 20, 2023, the article ranked 37th of more than 400,000 academic articles published around the same time in terms of “online attention”–mainly news articles and blogs. It has been viewed 146,000 times in its 5 months on the journal website. That is far more than any other article I have published there, and I suspect it is more than any other article the Archives of Sexual Behavior has published in years. Furthermore, the publicity I am aware of has been almost entirely favorable.

This publicity was partly due to steps I took. For example, early on I published an essay about the attempted cancellation of the article and Ken Zucker at the online magazine Unherd (Bailey, May 16, 2023). This led to both news coverage and future opportunities for my perspective (e.g., Bailey, July 10, 2023).

I was fortunate in at least two ways. First, I am tenured, thick-skinned, and annoyed by present trends in academia away from academic freedom and towards identity politics. Second, there is a large group of parents, clinicians, researchers, and public intellectuals worried about ROGD. They were also outraged by the censorship of the article, and they helped to fight it. During the controversy, I had direct support from the organizations Fair in Medicine and the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine.

Although the article has been retracted from Archives of Sexual Behavior, we will be republishing it elsewhere shortly. The article was published “open access,” which requires a non-trivial fee (approximately $3,000 U.S.). Terms of Springer Nature’s open access allows articles to be published wherever authors want. Our article has been republished at the new journal, Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (Diaz & Bailey, 2023b). JOIBS is the flagship journal of the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, whose mandate is to encourage and protect research and teaching about even controversial topics. The idea for JOIBS came, in part, from frustration about ideology-motivated retractions of research. Thus, JOIBS is the natural home of articles like ours.

Research Ethics and Censorship

Our article was ostensibly retracted because it violated the publisher’s policies about ethical review and informed consent. Although I don’t believe the publisher’s stated rationale, there is no denying that the alleged ethical issues with our paper provided an opening to criticize it and to demand its retraction. Specifically, these issues were: the lack of IRB review of the research prior to data collection; the lack of a formal informed consent procedure required by most IRBs (advised by university lawyers) beginning with a clear statement of the research, including listing of risks and benefits, and concluding with a signature (or in anonymous online studies, a click) acknowledging consent.

I have already discussed the fact that IRB review was not required of Suzanna Diaz. Furthermore, my own IRB advised me that I could be a collaborator on this project assuming the data were deidentified. (My IRB declined to look at the survey because the data were already collected.) Finally, the purpose of the study was clearly stated, and anonymity guaranteed. To be sure, it is unusual for an academic publication not to have undergone IRB review, and it is somewhat unusual for a survey published in an academic journal not to have included a legalistic consent statement, with agreement indicated by checkbox. But these conventions do not define ethical conduct, even if they are intended to promote it.

The issues named in our retraction are closely related to the work of IRBs, which are the primary regulators of research ethics in academia. Concerns that IRBs limit academic freedom and are sometimes agents of censorship have been expressed by many scholars and may be growing (e.g., Hamburger, 2004; Hottenstein, 2018; Katz, 2007; Schneider, 2015; Sola Pool, 1980).

I have been conducting human subjects research studies since the mid-1980s and have seen substantial changes during that time regarding the role of IRBs. Specifically, IRB review has become much more onerous, requiring researchers to waste time or abandon research plans (e.g., Alexander, 2017). And anxiety about potential violations of IRB policies has grown. I noticed the greatest changes in the late 1990s after IRB-related concerns caused human research to be temporarily halted at both Duke University and the University of Illinois at Chicago (Manier, 1999; Weiss, 1999). All universities fear this kind of shutdown, for both financial and reputational reasons.

There are some good reasons to have IRBs, especially protecting human subjects from potentially harmful medical interventions. I have a good relationship with Northwestern University’s IRB. The persons with whom I interact there are intelligent and knowledgeable and have always helped me obtain formal approval for my sometimes edgy and controversial research (e.g., surveys of pedophiles, furries, and men who want to amputate healthy limbs, and a future study of adolescents who may have ROGD). However, it is possible both to appreciate one’s own IRB and to believe that in general, IRBs have serious problems. They are too onerous, too powerful, and can be too intrusive (Schneider, 2015). Their necessity has been especially controversial for social and behavior research, where IRB intrusion often seems disproportionate to potential harms to human subjects (e.g., Schrag, 2010).

I do not know an academic psychologist who has no complaints about the IRB process. But few psychologists–or more generally researchers who work with IRBs–appreciate the potential of IRBs to be used as tools of censorship. They don’t know about this because few of them conduct research that anyone wants to censor. I am different. Many people would like to censor my research if they could. For example, after I published the book The Man Who Would Be Queen (Bailey, 2003), several influential, Internet-active, transwomen attacked me and the book because they didn’t like a theory I endorsed there (Dreger, 2008). The most effective attack was made through Northwestern’s IRB. I had considered this book to be a work of popular science including descriptions of people I knew rather than original research. Therefore, I did not seek or obtain IRB approval for journalistic interviews I conducted for the book. Ultimately, a university investigation agreed that the book did not meet federal guidelines for research requiring IRB approval. But the experience was highly stressful and costly in both money and time. (I suspect that if a similar controversy occurred nowadays, the book might well be retracted by the publisher, in the unlikely event it would ever be published.)

Although Northwestern’s IRB has not prevented me from conducting research, it is important to remember that most universities have their own IRBs, and different IRBs vary wildly in how reasonable they are. I just returned from a conference in which an untenured faculty member from another country confided that he had twice been denied permission to conduct a study related to sexual orientation that Northwestern’s IRB would find anodyne. His proposal was denied because the IRB objected to his biological approach to studying sexual orientation. That is, his research was suppressed for ideological reasons, with one member of the IRB labeling his research “dangerous.” The second denial of his application emphasized that his study would medicalize and marginalize homosexuality. This feedback had nothing to do with protecting human subjects, the reason why IRBs exist.

Between IRBs’ ability to block research for reasons besides clear potential harmfulness to subjects, the fact that IRBs follow drastically different guidelines, and universities’ strong preference to protect research funding, ethical regulation is an underappreciated tax on free and open inquiry, especially of controversial topics. An author of a book highly critical of IRBs wrote:

IRBs have become censors because they have been told to censor. IRBs may decide what questions researchers can ask, how to ask them, how to analyze answers and how to report findings. IRBs' incentives lead them into the classic censors’ faults -- like constraining too much for too little reason. If IRBs say no, little harm can come to them: researchers may be dismayed, but they cannot afford to alienate regulators who have unreviewable authority over their work. If IRBs say yes, they risk blame for trouble that (justly or not) the research provokes. This trouble can be painful, including institutional embarrassment, lawsuits and federal sanctions. (Jaschik, 2015).

Thus, even before the retraction of our article, I disliked the increased involvement of journals and publishers in assuring IRB approval and ethical research conduct. I have only noticed this during the past decade or so. Before then, IRB approval was between researchers and their universities. Without approval, researchers could get in serious trouble. But journals didn’t check. It is unclear to me why journals have decided they must involve themselves in IRB-related matters, but they have. To submit an article to the Archives of Sexual Behavior, I must include a statement like the following under the heading “Compliance with Ethical Standards”:

The authors certify that the research complies with ethical standards and was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Northwestern University.

The relevant statement in the retracted article (which did not undergo IRB review) was as follows:

The first author and creator of the survey is not affiliated with any university or hospital. Thus, she did not seek approval from an IRB. After seeing a presentation of preliminary survey results by the first author, the second author suggested the data to be analyzed and submitted as an academic article (he was not involved in collecting the data). The second author consulted with his university’s IRB, who declined to certify the study because data were already collected. However, they advised that publishing the results was likely ethical provided data were deidentified. Editor’s note: After I reviewed the manuscript, I concluded that its publication is ethically appropriate, consistent with Springer policy.

The introduction of publishing companies such as Springer Nature into ethics policing does not protect human subjects, who are already overprotected by university IRBs. Rather, it provides one more way to censor ideas unpopular to ideological comrades and customers.

What is to be done?

The failure of most academics to value academic freedom has been one of the most disappointing lessons during my long career, and this is getting worse. No good solution will come from university professors or (worse) administrators at large. (Too) small groups of academics distraught about the decline of academic freedom and the related decline in quality of academic scholarship provide some reason for hope. The example of SOIBS creating JOIBS is a good one. Of course, JOIBS will start slowly, because most academics will send their work to traditional “prestige” journals. But open-eyed skeptical academics notice that those journals are pushing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the expense of fearless truth-seeking. JOIBS has the potential to compete to publish excellent research that challenges the extensive ideological preferences current in academia. The JOIBS initiative is refreshing because it is more than the complaining and handwringing that preoccupy most groups of fed-up academics these days, in my experience. (As a member of SOIBS who has submitted an article to JOIBS, I could be accused of bias. I am eager to hear of other promising initiatives!)

The online furor directed against the retraction of our article was also encouraging, and I suspect, a warning to publishers, such as Springer Nature. I doubt the managers there liked that attention. There have been rumblings of discontent about academic publishers making large profits off the backs of academics, universities, and taxpayers (Hagve, 2020; Mayoni, 2023). Publishers appearing to take sides in ideological disputes would seem both unnecessary and bad for their business. The saying “go woke, go broke” referred to practices like this, and recent events at Harvard (Egan & Dolan, 2023), Disney (Smith, 2024), and in industry (Cole & Nicholson, 2024) support its truth.

The most important thing to do for now is to raise awareness about ideology-motivated retraction and attempts to suppress research about ROGD. I am proud to have been retracted for those reasons and will keep trying to produce research worth suppressing.

Postscript

After I submitted this article on the journal website, it was sent back to me because, among some other reasons, I had not included a “Compliance with Ethical Statement.” I subsequently provided a complete and true ethical statement that I hope will be published.

Data availability

Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

Ethics declarations

Because no human subjects data were collected for this manuscript, this concern does not apply to this manuscript. However, because you asked, the requirement by this publisher to make “ethics declarations” and to consider these prior to sending the manuscript out for review and possibly to retract articles on the basis of ostensible violations of publisher’s policy does not plausibly protect human subjects but has had demonstrably negative effects on academic freedom. The publisher should stop requiring ethics declarations.

Consent to Participate

Because no human subjects data were collected for this manuscript, this is irrelevant.

Conflicts of Interest

On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

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