Anatomy of a Scientific Scandal: Under pressure, a journal once notable for its courage retracts a major paper on the social roots of gender-related distress—all over a minor, inconsistently applied technicality.

On April 18, only weeks after the paper was published, Bailey received a list of questions from the executive committee of the International Academy of Sex Research (IASR) about the Institutional Review Board (IRB) ethics-approval process at Northwestern University, where Bailey works. The following day, a message from IASR’s Executive Committee began circulating on its listserv notifying recipients of “significant concerns about the ethical conduct and integrity of the editorial process” at ASB. Members were told that IASR was consulting with the journal’s editor and its publisher, Springer Nature, to address these concerns.

Springer Nature reached out to Bailey on April 28. “Some questions have been raised about the article,” the publisher wrote, “and we are investigating them together with our Research Integrity Group.” The email’s focus was entirely on the IRB ethics approval process obtained before publication, which is a formal procedure that applies to all proposed research on human subjects to ensure it is conducted ethically and that participants are properly safeguarded. Springer asked Bailey to “provide details regarding the protocol you submitted to your IRB for evaluation and any relevant documentation regarding the evaluation process.”

Two weeks later, on May 5, an open letter addressed to both the IASR and Springer Nature was published. The letter called for the removal of Kenneth Zucker from his position as editor-in-chief at ASB in response to his decision to publish Diaz and Bailey’s study. The letter had 100 main signatories, including Marci Bowers, president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and a slew of other academics and medical professionals. All threatened that they would “no longer submit to the journal, act as peer reviewers, or serve in an editorial capacity until Dr Zucker is replaced with an editor who has a demonstrated record of integrity on LGBTQ+ matters and, especially, trans matters.” Specifically, the letter asserted that Zucker’s decision to publish the study “threatens the foundations of research ethics” because the paper’s authors had not obtained IRB ethics approval before data collection and publication.

Bailey promptly addressed the concerns regarding IRB ethics approval. The initial survey data used in the study, he explained, was gathered by the paper’s lead author, the pseudonymous Diaz, who is not affiliated with an institution that requires IRB approval for such a project. Moreover, Northwestern’s IRB representative informed Bailey that, though the IRB could not retrospectively approve the pre-collected data, it would permit him to coauthor a paper on those data provided they were expunged of all personal identifiable information. Significantly, Springer’s own policy explicitly states that in situations where “a study has not been granted ethics committee approval prior to commencing. . . . The decision on whether to proceed to peer review in such cases is at the Editor’s discretion.” Thus, all efforts to undermine the study or discredit Zucker’s decision to review and publish it on the grounds of IRB considerations appeared futile.

[...]

The activist playbook here was simple: get the Diaz and Bailey paper retracted over a technicality, then spin the retraction as an invalidation of the study’s main findings. Such a tactic was successfully used on Littman’s 2018 ROGD paper; the journal’s decision to re-review the paper and issue a “correction” has been repeatedly and disingenuously leveraged by proponents of “gender-affirming” care to declare the study “debunked.”