Some of the most prestigious medical journals are refusing to publish corrections to papers that contain demonstrably false claims about ‘gender medicine.’
That’s the main finding of Dr. J. Cohn, author of ‘Censorship of Essential Debate in Gender Medicine Research.’ She noted the ‘low or very low-certainty evidence for the benefits of medical gender interventions’—echoing last year’s Cass Review—including suicide prevention. Despite the facts, academic medical journals continue to publish demonstrably false claims about gender medicine.
Since 2022, when these dubious ‘facts’ appeared online or in print, including in the JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Pediatrics, Cohn has submitted corrections: a normal part of the peer review process. Typically, journal editors responded with assertions about their confidence in the articles and their parallel doubts about the rigorous scholarship cited by Cohn.
Separately, in order to process her submission, correspondents from JAMA Surgery made intrusive requests for personal information, with no guarantees of Cohen’s data security. Eventually ‘ghosting’ her became the norm.
The same publications have asserted that most recipients of pharmaceutical and surgical interventions are satisfied (‘low regret rates’) in the absence of reliable collated data. Similar evidence-free claims report a reduced suicide rate thanks to these approaches; there’s little sympathy for psychotherapy as a non-surgical alternative.
Cohn also submitted four critiques to PubPeer, a post-publication peer review site designed to let researchers comment on published work. All were accepted and published within days, but one month later, all four were removed within five minutes and listed as rejected, without explanation.
Part of the problem is that the crank World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) is now firmly ensconced in the feedback loop for determining what constitutes ‘good’ gender medicine. This is an organisation promoting adolescent sex-change surgeries, which has controversially advocated for ‘eunuch’ to be recognised as a gender identity. Its website has hosted disturbing content, including a folder labelled ‘erotica’ that reportedly contained material depicting the castration of boys.
As trans ideology critic Graham Linehan says of Cohen’s intervention:
When authoritative journals publish incorrect claims about known benefits and low regret rates whilst omitting less invasive alternatives, it looks almost exactly like fraud and medical abuse.
