The Absurd Yet Possibly Legitimate Diaz & Bailey Retraction
"Unequal Treatment Under the Flaw"?
The Archives of Sexual Behavior recently retracted an article reporting survey results from over 1600 parents regarding rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD). Gender dysphoria refers to "strong, persistent feelings of identification with another gender and discomfort with one's own assigned gender and sex." Rapid onset means such feelings and discomfort appearing more or less suddenly and apparently out of the blue. ROGD runs afoul of activists (both in and outside of academia) because it implies that, at least for some people, transgender identity has the superficial features of a social contagion, rather than reflecting deep, enduring commitment to identifying as a different gender/sex indelibly etched on the person’s psyche.
This essay is not about the scientific evidence for or against ROGD. It is, instead, about Unequal Treatment Under the Flaw — the title of an excellent artice by Jukka Savolainen — on how articles that cross progressive activists and, especially, various social justice agendas (Jukka focused on race and crime) are now retracted for real or imagined flaws that are never used to retract articles with identical flaws that support the same activist/social justice agendas. From the abstract:
Evidence from additional case studies illustrates selective application of methodological standards based on the political implications of the findings. Serious errors are less likely to be treated as fatal if the contribution supports the activist agenda. By contrast, methodologically sound contributions are labeled as flawed if they challenge the dominant narrative.
Or, as The Orwelexicon puts it:
The Ridiculous Accusation
What are the ostensible reasons the Diaz & Bailey article on ROGD was retracted? Because the authors supposedly failed to get “informed consent.” In general, informed consent refers to potential participants being informed about the study before actually participating in it. For people who are competent and free adults (all except, e.g., children, the incarcerated, those with severe mental illnesses that they require a separate guardian and the like), my view is that, for questionnaire studies, like Diaz & Bailey’s, informed consent is provided by virtue of answering the questions. That is, competent adults are fully capable and free to not answer any or all questions, if they so choose. The consent is implicit but clearly granted by virtue of answering the questions.
The paper appeared in Archives of Sexual Behavior, which does include this very odd feature of what it requires as informed consent:
Consent to publish
Individuals may consent to participate in a study, but object to having their data published in a journal article. Authors should make sure to also seek consent from individuals to publish their data prior to submitting their paper to a journal. This is in particular applicable to case studies.
This strikes me as bizarre requirement, because a researcher cannot possibly anticipate every possible use of research data (with an exception I’ll get to in a minute). Blogs? Peer review? Chapters? Op Eds? Colloquia? Panels? Teaching materials? And on and on... No researcher can seriously anticipate every possible public use of data.
If we are all going to be at risk of being accused of ethics violations every time we report results of our research in some specific format for which we have not asked specific permission, zillions of articles are going to need to be retracted, now and in the future. What if someone writes a book and reviews the relevant research? Should the book not be published because the researchers authoring the hundreds of studies in the book did not specifically ask to publish the findings in book format? This really is ridiculous.
Contrast this with some bona fide ethics violations:
X reported info identifying particular people and did not request their permission
X put participants in heightened risk of physical harm without informing them upfront and getting their permission.
These are reasons to retract an article for ethics violations involving failure to provide informed consent. Point 1 is why the “case studies” requirement of Archives actually does make sense. A case study may often provide enough information about a single individual that that person’s identity might be deduced by some readers. If this risk is not articulated up front, and accepted by the participant, then sure, that is an actual ethics violation that would warrant retraction.
Journals are Private Entities and Can Inflict Any Rules They Please, No Matter How Arbitrary or Ridiculous
I had never heard of this requirement to get “consent to publish in a peer reviewed journal” before this event. It looked like an entirely post hoc pseudo-justification concocted just to put some plausible window dressing over ridiculous retraction-by-mob nonsense. However, this does not appear to be the case. I checked the WayBackMachine, and this requirement of “consent to publish in a peer reviewed journal” does seem to have been Archives’ policy for many years (I checked as far back as 2020, but for all I know, it started well before that).
I think this is kinda ridiculous, and not doing it is not any sort of ethics violation. BUT, the journal also has the right to have any rules it likes. If they require authors to submit photos of themselves doing cartwheels, or to donate to The Catholic Charities of America, or to drive Tesla’s, they have every right to retract articles that fail to meet their requirements, no matter how ridiculous I (or anyone else) thinks they are. If the “consent to publish” rule really was in place before the study was conducted or submitted, then the paper does seem to have violated at least the letter of this rule. And if it violated the journal's ethics policy, no matter how ridiculous I might think that policy is, the journal has the right to retract.
A Big Bad Butt (“Butt” rather than “But” Because it Might Make an Ass out of Archives)
Now, an embedded issue is whether Archives ever applied this standard to any other research they published or considered for publication. Have they ever even checked to determine whether the articles they publish received “consent to publish”? I do not know.
If the cops only ticketed gay couples for jaywalking, yeah, it is illegal, but that would not seem to be the real problem here. American society is filled with anachronistic laws that are almost never enforced (such as the NJ law requiring bicycles to have bells; and, when they are, sometimes, enforced, this is sometimes done selectively in a discriminatory manner).
So, if the rule "exists" but has never been previously applied (even where it would apply), it is reasonable to treat the rule as an unenforced anachronism (like sodomy laws still on the books). I am not a lawyer, but the selective enforcement of ridiculous anachronistic laws that hardly anyone even knows about strikes me as behavior far more immoral, unethical and harmful than the technically sanctionable behavior.
On yet another hand, though, I have no idea whether Archives ever applied the “consent to publish” requirement before this event. If they have, although it would still be a ridiculous rule to apply to simple questionnaire research, it is a legitimate retraction (in the sense that they are consistently following their own rules). If, however, they have not, this would be a clear example of Unequal Treatment Under the Flaw.
Disclosure that some of you may find of some interest: I am the editor of The Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (JOIBS). We do not have Archives’ “consent to publish” requirement. The retracted Diaz & Bailey paper is now under review at JOIBS.
This essay started out as an email exchange between Jake Mackey, one of the founders of Free Black Thought, and me. I thank him for encouraging me to scale it up to this essay.
In a feminised society it is inevitable that feelings will start to overwhelm any other concerns. Men learned over time to handle their much larger force and aggression with impartially applied laws and rules, generating our enormous wealth. However, where empathy is crucial for the private sphere, it is pathological for the reasons you describe in the public sphere. Women must learn to check their emotional incontinence before they enter the workplace or they will destroy our wealth generating institutions through ethic committees.
In fact, Bailey asked his IRB at Northwestern University if they would require approval for secondary use of anonymized data. They responded that they do not. This is common for IRBs in North America and Europe. Secondary use of anonymized data is beyond the control of the participant and does not place any participants into risk, specifically because the data are anonymized (i.e., no one can be identified as having participated). So, essentially, Baily had IRB approval to publish secondary use of anonymized data. It is not clear what Diaz' website requirements were for parents to upload their data (which was used not only by Bailey, but by Diaz herself in conferences that she attended). But the website was a forum for parents of ROGD kids, and to my knowledge, NO PARTICIPANT COMPLAINED about Diaz or Bailey using their anonymized data. Instead, the "complaints" came from special interest groups and people opposed to ROGD. The publisher (and NOT the journal editor) decided to cave in and retract the paper. In fact, the Editor-in-Chief was allowed to make a discretionary call on publishing a paper with secondary use of data. So, again, the overwhelming majority of complaints came from special interest groups opposed to the concept of ROGD. Some complaints came from members and executives of the International Academy of Sex Research (the parent organization associated with the Archives of Sexual Behavior), and one in particular pointed out that the IRB at his university would never allow secondary use of data without IRB approval. An editor of a sister journal from a different publisher also added that they would not publish any data that had not received full IRB approval. I suspect this is where the Archives publisher (Springer Nature) got the idea to base their forced (and post-hoc) retraction on. It is beyond shameful and definitely not legitimate given that Bailey had done due diligence by asking his IRB if he needed approval. University IRBs in North America operate on rules typically set up by Ethics Councils funded by granting agencies. Other IRBs are independent (e.g., for industry), but still operate on the same rules. For the past decade, something known as "mission creep" has been spreading across IRBs, in which their role in protecting research participants expands to protecting the university's "brand" from research that might be "risky" or leave a bad impression in the minds of the public. I am sure you all can imagine how sex research in general, and research on gender that runs afoul of certain special interest groups in particular, might get handled. A million "what-if" scenarios are often conjured up, with the researcher having to answer how those potential scenarios will be dealt with, no matter how utterly unlikely or downright ridiculous they are. And don't expect to get them all at once. They will be added to each iteration of the ethics review, sometimes for years which makes it impossible to actually do any research. And as if the "what-ifs" aren't enough, the mission creep can often decide that the ethics committee must review the protocol for "scientific validity"! This can apply to grants that have already been approved by grant selection committees of scientific granting agencies! AS IF the members of the IRB have the expertise to review the scientific merit or validity of experiments outside their domain! I know of a colleague in the US whose IRB NEVER allowed her to show porn in her lab, despite that being part of an approved NIH grant to stimulate sexual arousal! And why? Because they didn't think it was proper science (in addition to all the what-ifs, like WHAT IF a participant doesn't get an erection and then sues the university and researcher for causing erectile dysfunction).
So, between mission creep, current "ethical" sensibilities (and lack of sense), and the type of identity politics that makes everyone who is anyone a victim, it is difficult as hell to do sex research. The Diaz and Bailey retraction is as deplorable as it is nescient.