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Action Item: Retract a Paper from an Anti-Trans Hate Group

Support good science in <60 seconds with this petition.

Action Item: Retract a Paper from an Anti-Trans Hate Group

If the headline is all you need to see, click here to sign the petition.

As I’ve written about many times now, anti-trans hate is not popular among the general public. All the anti-trans bills in the country are being propped up by a few well-funded hate groups who can a) manufacture consent with the right-wing media apparatus, b) buy the resources needed to craft, promote, and pass legislation, and c) fund bad science so they can cite “real journal articles” in said legislation.

That last point is critical: legislation to strip rights from human beings becomes a lot more viable when you have scientific studies that supposedly show that doing so is the right thing to do.

Take the now well-debunked Cass Review, for instance. The Cass Review was promoted as a meta-analysis of research on gender-affirming care and suggested against providing such care to minors. However, there were numerous methodological problems with the study, from inconsistent standards of evidence to not including studies that demonstrated the effectiveness of care to incredibly strong bias (check out all the studies cited for more info, because this just scratching the surface). The Review also failed to disclose that representatives from “the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM)” were involved with writing the report; SEGM is classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBT hate group. However, none of this stopped the Cass Review from being cited in legislation to take away bodily autonomy from trans people of all ages.

Well, now SEGM is at it again. The Schwartz et al. review, published in June in the journal Discover Mental Health, completely misrepresents the literature on the subject. In many cases across this article, the authors cite articles that actually have the exact opposite conclusion that the Schwartz review claims they do.

Let’s be clear: these are non-experts with a clear political agenda trying to use the authority of science to support that agenda. Regardless of where you fall on LGBT issues, this is not what science is about.

By signing this petition, you can back our request to the journal to take this unscientific article down. Please consider signing and spreading the word by sharing this post! For more information, below is a message from E. Kale Edmiston, PhD, an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Biomedical Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School. The petition page also has more information about why this article is unscientific.

Click here to sign the petition.

Hello Colleagues,

Several scientists and I have begun a campaign to retract a paper that purports to review new harmful effects of transgender healthcare, specifically of estrogen. The authors of this paper are not researchers or experts and list their affiliation as the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. Many of you may already be aware that SEGM is a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group. The review itself completely misrepresents the literature- cites articles that do not include samples of people on estrogen to argue that estrogen is harmful, misreports findings, and is generally not scholarly. I have provided expert testimony in court cases challenging bans to hormone therapy, and SEGM has been very successful at writing these “reviews” and then citing them in court cases. So, even though the journal is not high impact and the quality of the paper is poor, this misinformation has the potential to have a direct impact on policy. It has already made the rounds on several far-right news sites.

I had previously reached out to the editor of the journal, and she told me that she was uninterested in discussing this issue with me. I then filed an ethics complaint with the journal’s publisher. However, this process began some months ago, and now I have started a more public facing campaign.

I am asking that you review my detailed critique of the paper, and, if you feel that you agree with my conclusions about its significant flaws, that you sign the petition and share with your networks, including on social media. Others have had success with these retraction petitions in the past, including a colleague who called for the retraction of a paper that suggested neuromodulation as a “treatment” for transgender identity. The article itself and my detailed critique of it are both linked in the petition here: https://chng.it/mVsmwJb4Kw My critique is quite long. In sum, the authors selectively report and often argue that the findings of individual papers are exactly the opposite of the stated findings.

We are all are facing varying levels of risk in terms of what we can and cannot say publicly; for that reason, if your personal risk assessment is such that you cannot publicly support this, I understand. We are all doing what we can right now, and there are many ways to protect each other.

I of course welcome any thoughts you might have. I have bcc’d just because I don’t want to overwhelm everyone’s inbox with replies.

Thank you again, and I hope everyone is holding up in a very challenging time.

Best,

E. Kale Edmiston, PhD

Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Biomedical Sciences

UMass Chan Medical School

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