A research firm that publishes independent scholarly articles has retracted a paper that details more than a thousand parents’ concerns that their children were pressured to change their genders. The paper’s authors are saying their study was redacted due to blowback from a transgender community angered by its findings. 

The article, titled “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases,” was written by a Northwestern University psychology professor, Michael Bailey, and the head of Parents of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria Kids, Suzanna Diaz. Ms. Diaz’s organization acts as a support network for parents of children with gender dysphoria.  

The paper surveyed more than 1,500 parents about their experiences of caring for children and young adults who have transitioned. It details “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” a “controversial theory” that “common cultural beliefs, values, and preoccupations cause some adolescents (especially female adolescents) to attribute their social problems, feelings, and mental health issues to gender dysphoria.”

The paper itself received some criticism online. One professor at Indiana University, Lorenzo Lorenzo-Luaces, said in a tweet viewed more than 50,000 times that the “terrible” paper is “transphobia masquerading as science” and deserved retraction. 

“I hate that this got published,” the professor wrote on Twitter. “I’ve said this before but I’d love to contribute to the community fighting back against this.”

The paper was retracted by Springer Nature, an independent scholarly database, which Mr. Bailey says “sets a dangerous precedent.”

“The vitally important question of how best to help gender-dysphoric youth, whose numbers have sharply increased, is one of the most urgent questions in medicine today,” Mr. Bailey wrote in a letter to the Springer publishers, objecting to the retraction. “We must promote such ground-breaking research, not quash it.”

Mr. Bailey also said that this decision will harm the publishers’ reputations should they not walk back from the retraction. “To silence the critical conversation around gender issues will result in harm to Springer’s important position as a source for fair, unbiased publication of scholarly articles addressing the urgent gender issues facing society today,” he wrote in his letter to the publishers. 

Mr. Bailey did not reply to a request from the Sun for comment.

The reason for the retraction, Springer claims, is that the authors did not receive the informed consent that is necessary for publishing such data. 

“The Publisher and the Editor-in-Chief have retracted this article due to noncompliance with our editorial policies around consent,” the publisher wrote in a retraction notice. “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.”

Following the survey of parents, Mr. Bailey and Ms. Diaz analyzed the research findings in order to come to the determination that ROGD is “a socially contagious syndrome” spread mostly online between disaffected or mentally ill adolescents and young adults. The authors note that “these youths were disproportionately (75 percent) natal female,” meaning born female. 

During their research, the authors found that there were social and institutional pressures placed on parents after their children began exhibiting signs of gender dysphoria. “Parents reported that they had often felt pressured by clinicians to affirm their adolescent or young adult child’s new gender and support their transition. According to the parents, adolescent and young adult children’s mental health deteriorated considerably after social transition.”

Mr. Bailey and Ms. Diaz offer two hypotheses for the rapid increase in gender dysphoria among children and young adults. 

The first, they say, is that transgender people are simply receiving the care they have always needed, but are only now being recognized by the medical community. “There has not been an increase in the actual number of gender dysphoric adolescents, but more of them are being recognized and referred to gender clinics,” the authors hypothesize. They note that those who take this view tend to support the rights of children and young adults to transition both socially and medically. 

The second hypothesis is that there has been a genuine increase in the number of children and adolescents who believe that they themselves are transgender amid social debate about the issue and the prevalence of press coverage of transgender people. 

The authors write that mentally ill children and young adults come to the incorrect conclusion that they “believe that they are transgender, and that they must undergo social and medical gender transition to resolve their issues.” Mr. Bailey and Ms. Diaz write that ROGD is “a culture-bound syndrome, which did not exist until recently, when transgender issues began to attract considerable cultural attention.”

While there have been myriad criticisms of the study on social media, scientific criticism of the study was largely focused on its methodology.

For the original publication of the study, Ms. Littman recruited survey respondents from websites like 4thWaveNow, Transgender Trend, and Youth TransCritical Professionals, which are online spaces often characterized as critical of the transgender movement.

The landing page for TransgenderTrend, for example, welcomes users with the remark “Listen here to Founder and Director Stephanie Davies-Arai talking about the harms of gender ideology for children and young people.”

One behavioral and social scientist at Brown University, Arjee Javellana Restar, for example, published criticism of Ms. Littman’s study arguing that sampling parents from these sites and not contacting the children themselves compromised the study’s results.

Other methodological criticism from academics, such as a McGill University sociologist, Florence Ashley, have included allegations that the language of the study is a “deliberate attempt to weaponize scientific-sounding language.”

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This dispatch has been expanded from the bulldog edition to include additional comment on the study.