Almost immediately, Gliske’s paper was denounced by a group of researchers and activists who accused it of peddling dangerous ideas about trans people. Unfortunately, eNeuro did not respond with agility. Over a disastrous, opaque, flawed process that took months to unfold, the journal first demanded Gliske choose between cutting one section of the paper and having it retracted. After he agreed to the cut, the journal put an edited version online. Then, when academics again complained, this time launching a Change.org petition, the journal launched yet another round of reviews and eventually retracted the paper.
Before explaining the way things spiraled out of hand, it’s important to acknowledge that the initial critique of Gliske’s paper had some merit to it. The first version contained a section entitled “Implications for clinical practice”. In it, Gliske argued that “The use of gender reassignment as a therapy is sometimes motivated on the assumption that the distress is due to the individuals having a brain sex different than their gender assigned at birth and that the desire to change genders is based on a correct sense of true gender.”
If, as Gliske’s own theory suggested, this is false, it could call into question such treatments, he argued. “Our new theory furthers the discussion regarding biologically-based treatments independent of gender identity affirmation that might address distress and body ownership in individuals with gender dysphoria.” That is, “treatments based on our new theory could instead involve targeting the distress and/or body ownership networks, perhaps specifically seeking to restore a sense of ownership over body parts perceived as incongruous.”
Anyone even faintly aware of the politics surrounding trans rights will understand why this was an ill-advised passage. While the present state of the evidence that transition works is not as sturdy as it could be, and some people with gender dysphoria are actively hoping for other options, it is still the case that transition is the only real game in town at the moment, and that access to it feels like a life-and-death matter for many trans people. Moreover, there’s also a dark history of attempts to biologically alter LGBT people to ‘fix’ them.
It’s not unreasonable, then, that a trans person, or someone who simply cares about them, might be alarmed reading a paper that raises, without much context, the possibility of “biologically-based treatments independent of gender identity affirmation that might address distress and body ownership in individuals with gender dysphoria”.
On 7 December, with the article up on eNeuro’s website in a near-final, post-peer-review form, the journal’s editor-in-chief, Christophe Bernard, a French neuroscientist, emailed Gliske. After laying out some of the concerns raised about the paper, Bernard wrote, “We therefore ask you to remove the Implications for Clinical Practice section, as well as any other reference to clinical implications throughout the article, abstract, and Significance Statement, before final publication. These changes will be noted to journal readers with a formal published notice. … If you decline to make these changes, the Editorial Board will move to retract your article on the grounds that the clinical implications are not supported by the available data.”
Whether or not this critique was well-grounded (and, again, I believe it was, although the bit about the “available data” didn’t make much sense given that Gliske was positing a new theory) this is an unusual situation. It isn’t common for the author of a paper that has already gone through the peer-review process to be told he or she has to delete one particular section or choose to have the entire paper retracted. But what came next was even stranger.
Some of the activists criticizing the paper were not mollified by the revisions made to it. Instead, a group of them led by Troy A. Roepke of Rutgers University, launched a Change.org petition demanding not only retraction of the paper, but revisions to eNeuro’s editorial process which would ensure that “at least one reviewer should come from the community directly impacted by these types of papers to ensure that language and intent are not dangerous, deleterious, or damning”.
The petition distorts and misrepresents the contents of the paper in basic ways. After claiming, without any evidence, that “the clear intent of the paper was to do harm to the transgender community, one of the most vulnerable communities across the globe” (bolding in the original), it argues that there is a “basic assumption that transgender people are a deleterious deviation with a disordered network of brain regions which pervades the entire manuscript”.
But the paper isn’t about, and makes no moral claims of any sort, about transgender people — it’s about the neurological origins of gender dysphoria. It doesn’t take a particularly sophisticated grounding in philosophy to understand that whether GD is the result of one brain theory versus another doesn’t, on its own, prove anything about the moral status or worth of people with gender dysphoria.
The most vicious homophobic bigots, after all, are just as enthusiastic about gay-bashing whether the theory is that homosexuality is genetic (in which case the responsible genes need to be wiped out), or the result of corrupt cultural influences (in which the responsible influences need to be wiped out). This is just a wild moral leap on the part of the petitioners, and it’s surprising that the journal would pay any mind to such a confused and inflammatory petition.
But not only did the journal heed this group’s input, it let Roepke and eight coauthors pen a response that was published on the eNeuro website alongside the original article. That response is just as strange as the petition, exhibiting a lack of familiarity with the evidence base for treating gender dysphoria, and with the specific arguments of Gliske’s paper. For example, the authors accuse Gliske of making claims which conflict with existing empirical observations about gender-affirming intervention, ignoring the fact that he quite specifically states that treatment can alleviate distress — and they themselves cite a paper pointing out the weakness of the evidence base for hormones.
It would have been strange enough for the eNeuro editors to give so much oxygen to Roepke’s bad-faith petition and response. But it’s what happened next where this story tips over from ‘strange’ into ‘bizarre’ — for now Gliske received an email from eNeuro informing him that, actually, the paper was being retracted.
The editors’ reasoning is explained in a ‘synthesis statement’ which, again, contains many odd claims that don’t quite line up with the paper that was actually published. It often reads as though the editors simply threw as many complaints at the wall as they could — many of them picayune and easily debunked by reading the paper or the editorial comments sent to Gliske during the editing process — in an attempt to make the paper seem extremely sloppy.
At one point, for example, the authors note that Gliske used the word transsexual, and that this, along with some other terms in the paper, are “no longer adequate terms to be used and should be adjusted for a more respectful language”. But in the body of the paper itself there is a single use of this term: “I also use the term ‘transgender’ throughout this manuscript, though I recognize that some references instead use the word transsexual to refer to the same concept.” So his only use of this term is to explain that he is not going to use it, and to explain why it appears in the citations (transsexual is simply the older term for “being trans,” and is seen by some trans people as outdated or offensive, while others embrace it).
Similarly, the synthesis statement asks: “[W]hat exactly is the author trying to say in the paragraph noting that trans people have been found to have elevated presence of autistic traits within relation to their theory?”
But in an exchange still visible on the eNeuro site (archive), a reviewer recommended that Gliske add a mention of autism to the section on common gender-dysphoria comorbidities — not a surprise given the well-established link between the two conditions. Again, this is simply strange: in a public statement, the journal’s editors criticised the author of a paper for making an editorial decision the journal itself asked him to make.
But all these odd and nitpicky complaints could be seen as moot, because the reviewers give away the game in a sentence that clearly reveals their gripe is political, not scientific:”[T]he author appears disrespectful to the community because he/she does not seem to believe that a transgender person’s statement of belonging to one or the other gender is taken at face value and believed to be true.”
This is worth exploring. The authors of the synthesis statement don’t bother explaining what “belonging to one or the other gender” could possibly mean in a neuroscience context. Gliske’s paper has no bearing on the question of whether a trans person is ‘really’ a woman or a man (or neither in the case of a nonbinary person), because of course no theory of gender dysphoria could, on its own, settle such a philosophical and sociological issue.
His paper, again, is simply an attempt to posit a new theory about gender dysphoria. The only neuroscience-related explanation of this phrase which could apply here is something like “Gliske does not seem to believe that a transgender man/woman has a male/female brain”. But that, of course, is exactly the theory he is arguing against! If this is actually what his critics intended to mean, they are claiming that it “appears disrespectful” to posit that the brainsex theory of gender dysphoria is false.
This would be news to many gender dysphoric people. There is, of course, a vast diversity of opinion about what causes gender dysphoria among those who have or had the condition. There are desisters, who appear to outgrow the condition over time, usually in their younger years — they, of course, do not think that they were “trapped in the wrong body,” because their GD didn’t turn out to be permanent.
Detransitioners, meanwhile, don’t tend to believe in the brainsex theory either. While some destransition because they lack the money or support to continue living as their felt gender, others realize they simply weren’t really trans. A subset of detransitioners continue to have gender dysphoria, but do not believe the solution is to transition, because it didn’t work for them — in fact, when some detransitioners in this category tried to hold panels at a trans health conference, one on detransitioning and one on alternate treatments for GD, those panels were abruptly cancelled due to the outcry of activists
Many happily transitioned people, too, believe that whatever GD is, it’s more complicated than having one ‘type’ of body and the other ‘type’ of brain, or the closely related idea of having an innate and immutable ‘gender identity’: Trans writers ranging from Andrea Long Chu to Natalie Reed to Natalie Wynn (aka Contrapoints) to various ‘gender-critical’ trans women have all critiqued these ideas, which they tend to view as oversimplifications which don’t capture the full texture of the trans experience.
It makes no sense, then, to view theories of gender dysphoria as being off-limits if they tell a different story than brainsex-mismatch. To do so is to ignore the views of many, if not most, people with gender dysphoria. It’s also completely unscientific: When you don’t know much about what causes a phenomenon, you can’t draw strict boundaries about what sorts of explanations will be deemed worth exploring versus rejected out of hand.
This episode bears certain noteworthy similarities to what happened to Lisa Littman, the M.D. who in 2018 published a PLOS One paper on “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” or the very young and mostly unexplored theory that in some cases young people (usually teenage girls) might develop gender dysphoria and/or a transgender identity quite suddenly as a result of peer influence or social media. (For what it’s worth, in my own reporting I have certainly come across kids who fit that bill, but I’m careful not to posit this as a definite explanation in any particular case because so little is known about ROGD and it could be harmful for parents to jump to this conclusion regarding a newly ‘out’ child.)
Like Gliske, Littman was proposing a new theory that was viewed as threatening by some activists (they believe that the concept of ROGD is a means of ‘invalidating’ the claims of trans youth). Like Gliske, she dealt with a wave of criticism within and beyond the academy that often seemed geared at producing a high quantity of claims about her research rather than high-quality ones.
And like Gliske, she had to deal with institutions caving in to activists, and with a bruising post-peer-review re-review clearly designed to appease those activists: Brown University retracted the press release announcing the study and issued a bizarre ‘apology’ without noting anything in the paper that had been wrong, and PLOS One issued a ‘correction’ consisting of many cosmetic updates and then acknowledged to me that there had been no errors in the paper. (I had never heard of a paper being ‘corrected’ when there weren’t any errors.)
Littman subsequently published a paper showing that just about every critique issued at her paper in an attempt to invalidate it could also be applied to papers on trans youth that had garnered no complaints from activists, probably because those papers didn’t make any politically threatening claims.
“There is a clear double standard,” she told me in an email. “Research articles that do not adhere to the gender-identity affirming narrative are called out as unacceptable, even when their methods are consistent with those cited to support the use of the gender-identity affirming model of care. It appears as if groups are engaging in motivated reasoning — ‘I don’t want this research to be true, so I will aggressively question every single attribute of the work, even if I’m comfortable with those same attributes in research articles that support my view.’ Unfortunately, many people are misusing the terms ‘biased,’ ‘methodologically flawed,’ and ‘debunked’ when they really mean ‘challenges my assumptions,’ ‘comes to a different conclusion than me,’ and ‘has known limitations.’”
Littman, to her credit, hasn’t been deterred — she’s continuing to research this subject, and recently solicited the accounts of individuals who have desisted or detransitioned.
Maybe Stephen Gliske’s paper was completely off-base. Maybe it’s on the right track. Maybe it’s somewhere in between. Now that it’s been retracted, though, a message has been sent, loud and clear: Don’t try to look into this theory. That chilling effect is far more dangerous than any individual retraction or faux ‘correction’. In the long run, it will cut off entire avenues of research that could help lead us to better understand a very important and vexing subject.
Think about what the gender dysphoria research scene must look like at the moment to genuinely inquisitive, compassionate, brilliant 25-year-old neuroscientists, psychologists and psychiatrists-in-training? What possible reason would they have to want to attack this fascinating subject with any of the vigor and intellect they’d apply to other, less controversial subjects? All the incentives point in the opposite direction: Run far from here.
It’s heartbreaking to think of all the knowledge that will be lost as a result — and all the people who will suffer more than they needed to because of the way scientific inquiry was wrongly crimped.
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SubscribeThis entire issue has nothing to do with gay people. Please stop using the LGBT acronym — it is a false equivalence and deeply offensive. The gay rights movement has been hijacked by trans activists on a power trip assisted by ignorant and patronising “straight allies”.
Well, ‘gay rights’ was a hijacking of the apolitical ‘homophile movement’ by the New Left as part of their backlash against ‘the workers’ in what became ‘identity politics’. The category of ‘male homosexual’ was then with no justification broadened to include lesbians, who had not been subjected to discrimination and oppression as had male homosexuals.
I was put out of Liberty Union Party(Google it) in Vermont. Called a “transphobic bigot” for opposing the drugging of children for “gender dysphoria” and the elimination of Women’s Sports.
The instigator was an old, trusted close friend who is trans. Another reason for ousting me is that many of the radical trans activists are also closely connected to the violent elements in Antifa and support the looting going on in countless places in the U.S. This group and their supporters have taken over an ostensibly non-violent Party and are using it as a cover for promoting violence. The former friend of mine, Marina Brown, has run for office in VT and is unusually skilled at internet and other computer aspects. They and their partner,also trans, have a small arsenal in their house in rural NE Vt.More so than anyone I’ve ever met. And, on a personal note, still has a key to my apt., which they refuse to return.
Rather than simply responding with counter-arguments and additional evidence, there is an increasing tendency for people unhappy with a particular bit of research or journalism to ask for it to be withdrawn – i.e. to be expunged from the history of a debate. It happened to me and a pathologist colleague when The Times published a piece about some research in which we showed that contrary to claims from Orthodox Jewish and Muslim authorities, ritual slaughtering appeared to make no difference to the amount of blood remaining in meat. Happily, The Times did not surrender. These demands for withdrawal are the electronic equivalent of book-burning – and we all know what tends to get burned and ‘expunged’ next once people start on books. The expungers are the Brownshirts (and Redshirts) of academia and too many academics are becoming their appeasers.
It is indeed very bad news when scientific enquiry and discussion gets stifled for political reasons.
I blame the journals for pandering to the mob. Spineless!
The liberal ideology that underpins the journals, and in particular the state, has (for various reasons of decline) become less supportive of its authority, and now even the last vestiges of support, for the armed forces, is being increasingly challenged. What this means is that those left to defend their position alone, become spineless in the face of a potential confrontation with overwhelming numbers. To have a spine when alone means adopting a Rambo style of existence, or alternatively, in the same ideological framework, to gain support from other authoritarians who are sympathetic and can add backbone. In this way the liberal ideology is gradually changed to a more authoritarian model.
Unfortunately this is a group that, in the main, does not tolerate well either thinking or making links -two psychological traits strongly associated with autism, so the ‘elevated presence of autistic traits’ in GD is highly relevant.
Reports from therapists treating patients for GD consistently relate the experience of encountering concretised forms of resistance, time and again. The experience of the work seems to be one of ideological views overwriting capacity for deeper reflections on personal experience and openness to thinking as an individual. Attempts to encourage reflection or deeper thought are attacked, often labelled as ‘conversion therapy’ -though in my experience therapists are not interested in bringing about any such ‘conversion’ -they just want to get to something that feels authentically like the patient’s own authentic views. The resistance to thinking is so strong that the patient ofen experiences thought itself as invasive and intrusive -dangerous and inimical to a highly defended self structure.
This state of mind, attacks on thinking and making links, is not just applicable to GD patients -it appears to be a current, near ubiquitous state of mind for many at the moment – reaching pandemic levels across the globe on many ‘issues’. The capacity to stay with difficult thinking, in avoidance of plain ‘acting out’; the capacity to stay with ‘thinking under fire’ in times of crisis, appears to be in short supply over the whole world at the moment.
I have experienced a lifelong neuro-metabolic imbalance, which has yielded only to alternative medicine based in diet and exercise. Similar symptomotology took my mother’s life. It is physiologically agonizing in bizarre ways. Through escaping the mental health system and mis-diagnosis I learned that there is no “norm” of human behavior or consciousness. Gender dysphoria, schizophrenia, bipolar, etc. are always subjective calls.
I’m waiting for Anorexia Nervosa to be declared a “normal” human variant.
Indeed. No one would have ever suggested that Karen Carpenter was really fat in spite of what she said/believed. So why do people believe that Bruce Jenner is a woman because he says so?
A very interesting article, perhaps what is most troubling is not the howls of the affronted mob, but the failure of those in authority to hold the ring. By that I include editors, universities and the press. The deplatforming of those we disagree with has always been questionable. Much better to expose issues to healthy and vigorous debate.
Science should never “debate” anything itself surely? Should it not inform the debate?
If the debate/controversy/issue is preventing the ability to properly conduct “good” science, then something is wrong. Which is the main point you make – but that headline is misleading.
Isn’t anyone questioning the concept of “female brains” and “male brains”? Hasn’t science tried and failed over many years to establish significant, concrete differences between brains based on biological sex that have any discernible effect on cognition or personality? Feminists have been struggling against the old pink and blue boxes for decades, and here the trans activists are trying to cram us all back into them. Meanwhile, in a future that has regained its senses, I envision large class action suits filed by the children of today who will have been rendered sterile by irresponsible hormone treatments and medical procdures with no gate keeping provided by responsible adults to vulnerable minors.
Thank god the mob have no influence on physics and technology research. I am so glad I chose physics.
Think again after you check out this:
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Hopefully the tide will turn before the hard sciences actually drown but it is hard to tell.
Does anyone dare question the Neo-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory or Global Warming Theory? Are these settled sciences? Just try pointing out discrepancies or problems. Could there be alternatives to evolution that would explain the data better? It appears that the earth has gone through many cooling and warming cycles in the past. Which shall we choose as the ideal? (I suspect that the current inhabitants of the Sahara desert would prefer that northern Europe be frozen over. What was the atmospheric carbon dioxide level before the fossil fuels were fossilized? The carbon came from somewhere.)
Frankly, I am dismayed at the success of the ‘politically correct’ crowd to stifle any views but their own. This behavior should not be tolerated in scientific (or any) circles. Can those who disagree with one another still have honest discussions? Could we learn something by listening? Everyone has reasons for thinking what he (and yes, I use the masculine in the inclusive sense) thinks and the reasons may not be nefarious. Discussion is one of the great pleasures (and frustrations) of life as are the differences between the sexes!
Andrew H (below) beat me to it. The phrase “LGBT people” should be set aside. There is little reason to group all these people under a common umbrella acronym. It makes no more sense than ADGT (architects, doctors, garbage-collectors, trawler-men).
It’s because the trans movement is used as a cudgel to demoralize society. It’s more about pushing an agenda than helping people with gender dysphoria. The moneyed activists funding the movement don’t actually care about transpeople, It’s not and has never been about “rigorous scientific research.” If it was, they would accept other theories besides the “brainsex-mismatch”
You’d think that people would rather take a pill or go to some kind of psychotherapy to cure them of their “functional differences in associated brain networks” that are causing their gender dysphoria, rather than undergo painful expensive surgery, and the lifetime of hormone injections that come with it.
But then again, “functional differences in associated brain networks” is a nice way of saying “mentally ill.” And if we admit that gender dysphoria is a mental illness, and therefore transgender people are mentally ill, activists would be at risk of undoing 50 years of “progress” in other fields like homosexuality.
Then, I’m sure, people would start to research if people are “born gay,” rather than the ignored literature which says the vast majority of homosexual people were abused as children, and the trauma(trauma is the father of most illnesses, with entire fields and theories about how trauma causes all things from cancer to depression) triggered changes in their brain which caused them to be homosexual. No, I’m serious, I’m not being ridiculous, go look it up, sexually abusing children and/or significant trauma during childhood can cause them to be homosexuals, with many homosexuals admitting to childhood sexual abuse.
This would risk closing the door on the “they’re born that way” theory, and possibly reveal both homosexuality and transgenderism to be mental illnesses. In the case of homosexuals, they’re abused as children, and are victims, just not victims in the way agenda pushers would have you believe.
This whole thing just proves that science is not immune from corruption. Lots of scientific research that came out of the soviet union was likewise no better than kindling because anything published against the grain of the politburo got you sent to the reeducation centre. The only difference nowadays is anything published against the grain of social justice activists gets your paper retracted and fired from your job. We have not progressed from religious thinking and tribalism as much as one would like to believe. Religion was simply replaced by ideology and tribalism by various activist movements.
It’s an fanatical ideology and those wishing to debate it will be burned at the stake, so no science should leave it alone.
The shutting down of opposing views used to be ‘un-American.’ What happened? The leftist used to be the party of free speech. Seems the leftists are no longer liberals.
Isn’t this what has being going on re feminism for some time?
Lots of papers suck up to ideology, whether because the authors assume it’s a requirement or that it’s a good ploy to help attract funding / publication in the future. All sorts of ideological nonsense — indeed, what is at root hate-mongering ideological nonsense — regularly appears in what are supposedly science papers.
It’s usual in science papers to use the non-, if not anti-scientific ideological term ‘gender’ when of course the term should be ‘sex’. A journal editor might be well advised to send back any paper employing the term ‘gender’ (other than in citing its usage by others) on the grounds that it indicates the likelihood of other non- / anti-scientific nonsense in the paper.