The Absurd Yet Possibly Legitimate Diaz & Bailey Retraction

"Unequal Treatment Under the Flaw"?

The Massacre of the Innocents, Rubens, via Wikimedia

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:

For this entry, The Orwelexicon was actually cited in Jukka’s peer reviewed paper, Unequal Treatment Under the Flaw

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What are the ostensible reasons the Diaz & Bailey article on ROGD was retracted?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:

1. X reported info identifying particular people and did not request their permission

2. 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.

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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.