Of all the papers in the special issue of the Journal of Controversial Ideas on censorship in science, the one below is perhaps the most important, as the censorship being imposed can cause permanent damage to humans. I’ve described this censorship before: it involves papers on or critiques of extreme claims of gender ideologues, especially those touting the benefits of what’s called “affirmative care” (adolescent dysphoria—> doctor on board prescribes puberty blockers almost immediately—> hormones, surgery, and gender transition). The recent history of the field, documented in the first paper below, involves repeated attempts to allow questionable claims to stand in the literature. Two examples of this are the unsupported claim that affirmative care prevents suicide, and the release of the paper by Johanna Olson-Kennedy et al, which was held back because the results (puberty blockers did not improve mental health) were not in line with what author thought gender activists wanted to see. The paper by Cohn below (click to read), summarizes many of these forms of censorship or distortion.
Here’s the abstract:
The integrity of the gender medicine research literature has been compromised, not only by censorship of correct articles, but also by censorship of critiques of articles with unsupported (for instance exaggerated), misleading or erroneous statements. Many such statements concern the evidence base, which can be evaluated rigorously using a key component of evidence-based medicine, systematic reviews of the evidence. These reviews currently find there is limited to very little confidence that estimates of benefit from (and sometimes harm from) medical gender intervention, that is, puberty blockers, hormones and/or surgeries, are likely to match true outcomes. Several medical societies and articles in medical journals have been claiming otherwise, misrepresenting the evidence base as a whole and/or relying upon unsupported or non-representative individual study findings or conclusions. For example, high likelihood of benefit and low risk of adverse outcomes from medical gender interventions are often claimed, while less invasive alternative treatment options are either omitted or mischaracterized. Other unsupported, erroneous or misleading statements occur when studies minimize or omit mention of significant limitations, or report findings or conclusions not supported by their own data; these are then sometimes quoted by others as well. In addition, correctly reported studies are sometimes misrepresented. Critiques which attempt to rectify such statements are frequently rejected. Some examples are presented here. Such rejections have stifled scientific debate, interfering with the continual scrutiny and cross checks needed to maintain accuracy in the research literature. Currently, erroneous and unsupported statements circulate and repeat between journals and medical society guidelines and statements, misinforming researchers, clinicians, patients and the general public.
If you want a three-page summary of the paper above, which you really should read in toto if you’re interested in gender medicine, read the article below (click headline to read) gives a terse summary.
I can’t summarize the first paper in detail, and you really should read it for yourself. I can, however, give a few quotes from Linehan’s summary on his Substack, which is a bit choppy (quotes indented below). Linehan begins by citing the paper above:
‘Censorship of Essential Debate in Gender Medicine Research’ has the dullest possible title for what it reveals. In yet another example of trans ideology destroying everything it touches, the most prestigious journals in medicine are refusing to publish corrections to papers that contain demonstrably false claims about gender medicine.
The author, J. Cohn, didn’t set out to write about censorship. She tried to correct errors in published papers. When that didn’t work, she described what happened. She found that multiple systematic reviews (the gold standard in evidence-based medicine) have found low or very low-certainty evidence for the benefits of medical gender interventions. This includes puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery. ‘Low certainty’ means there’s limited confidence the estimated effects will match what actually happens to patients.
The Cass Review, published in 2024, found the evidence for paediatric interventions “remarkably weak.” Several other systematic reviews found the same for patients under 21 and under 26.
None have found that these interventions reduce suicide risk.
Meanwhile, major medical journals keep publishing papers claiming the opposite.
Papers in JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Pediatrics have variously claimed that gender-affirming medical interventions are:
- “Widely recognised as essential, evidence based, and often lifesaving”
- Known to “clearly improve health outcomes”
- Associated with “demonstrated health and well-being benefits”
- Linked to regret rates “less than 1%” or “exceedingly rare”
The regret claim is particularly bold given that the studies cited have major flaws. The often-quoted Bustos review included 27 studies, of which 23 had moderate-to-high risk of bias. All included studies suffered from premature follow-up, significant loss to follow-up, or both.
And one more bit:
Medical guidelines are supposed to work like this: researchers conduct systematic reviews of all available evidence, assess its quality, and make recommendations that match the strength of that evidence. Strong evidence gets strong recommendations. Weak evidence gets weak recommendations or no recommendation at all.
That’s not what happened here.
The American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement recommending gender-affirming care wasn’t based on systematic reviews. A subsequent analysis found its cited references “repeatedly said the very opposite of what AAP attributed to them.”
The Endocrine Society guidelines make strong recommendations based on evidence they themselves rate as low or very low certainty. They don’t explain why.
WPATH commissioned systematic reviews, then interfered with them. After publication, they dropped all but one minimum age recommendation (for phalloplasty) under pressure from the Biden administration and the AAP.
This whole field is rife with a form of advocacy so extreme that researchers not only hesitate to publish results that go against the preferred ideological narrative, but also repeatedly distort studies that criticize affirmative care.
This is not the way science is supposed to be done, but it’s what happens when ideology begins to erode the norms of science. This of course is not new: it’s what happened with the Lysenko affair in Soviet Russia (documented in our paper, Jussim et al.), when ideological distortion (and outright cheating) ultimately killed millions of people. Nobody’s claiming that kind of toll for gender medicine, but there is still a palpable human cost to sloppy research.
h/t: Joolz
More on this from Prof. Krauss (pursuant to PCC(E) book contribution), Amy Wax and her husband on these problems in medicine. So good I’ve listened to it twice.
Fifteen Years of DEI in Medicine, No Proof It Works | Roger Cohen, Amy Wax, & Lawrence Krauss
D.A.
NYC
Thanks for this David. I rarely get the time to listen to longer podcasts, but I have the luxury of time to watch some of these now as I’m on holiday (vacation 😉).
Science is true whether you agree with it or not. If you change the results to reflect your own views, then it is not science.
“doctor on board prescribes puberty blockers almost immediately”
I didn’t keep the link, but there’s a video on youtube made by gender criticals, somewhere, where a doctor prescribed blockers instantly, without even meeting the patient. It was done over the phone. There are places on the internet where children are coached about what to say to get blockers and wrong sex hormones. They are prepared to lie to get what they want. That’s why it’s essential that they have proper psychological investigations before being medicalised.
One of the studies that insisted that the regret rate is low only included people who stayed with the clinic, ie people who continued to transition. It was reported that 40% of people attending had dropped out. They were not followed up to find the reason why. The ‘study’ conveniently just left them out of the total in the results. It’s no surprise that they claim the regret rate is low when they have excluded 40% of people who stopped transitioning.
Dr Michael Webberley (co-founder of GenderGP with his wife Helen) was struck off for prescribing puberty blockers to a nine-year-old after a brief Zoom call (together with other prescribing hormones inappropriately – one of his teenage patients killed themselves shortly afterwards). https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj.o1357
Sadly, there are numerous other similar cases, so it might not be the one you were thinking of, Joolz.
The one I was referring to was in the USA, but you are right about the Webberleys.
Helen Webberley’s company moved abroad and she is still bypassing UK law and giving children access to blockers, even though she denies it in this interview. It’s semantics. She is the person who facilitates prescriptions.
She differentiates between ‘experts’ and ‘proper experts’, the latter, of course, are the ones who agree with her.🤦♀️
OK. I just finished the long piece by J. Cohn. It’s worse than I thought. It’s not just errant editors who are wielding power inappropriately—a comment I made in response to your earlier post (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/10/28/a-new-issue-of-j-controversial-ideas-on-censorship-in-the-sciences/). Bypassing evidence in favor of “expert opinion” is simply bad science. The “closed loop” of mutual reinforcement that has developed between medical societies and journals seems to offer no way out. And finally, Cohn points out that medical societies, politicians (the Biden administration), and gender activists all seem to be acting in “lockstep.” Lockstep. I wonder if Cohn means that as a polite way of saying that there’s a conspiracy.
Incidentally, here’s what Microsoft’s CoPilot says about J. Coen:
“J. Cohn is an anti-transgender activist associated with the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM). He has published under the pseudonyms “J. Cohn” and “Jay Cohn” and is known for his opposition to gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Cohn has been involved in various anti-trans publications and has made critical statements regarding gender identity and medical interventions for gender dysphoria.”
Oy. Even AI is getting into the act.
And check out the Wikipedia page for The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, Cohn’s listed affiliation. I only skimmed it, but it’s none too nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Evidence-Based_Gender_Medicine
Start of the Wikipedia page on SEGM:
“The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) is a non-profit organization that is known for its opposition to gender-affirming care for transgender youth and for engaging in political lobbying. SEGM is known for transgender health care misinformation. It has falsely claimed that the majority of transgender children desist, argued that gender exploratory therapy should be the first line treatment for those under 25, and promoted the scientifically unsupported theory of Rapid-onset gender dysphoria. SEGM is often cited in anti-transgender legislation and court cases, sometimes filing court briefs.”
Start of Grokipedia page for SEGM:
“The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit professional association founded in 2019 to promote the rigorous application of evidence-based medicine principles in youth gender dysphoria treatment. SEGM’s mission emphasizes safe, compassionate, ethical, and evidence-informed healthcare for children, adolescents, and young adults experiencing gender dysphoria, prioritizing systematic reviews of long-term outcomes, informed consent, and freedom from political or ideological influences. The organization critiques the evidence base for medical interventions such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in minors, finding benefits highly uncertain while harms, including infertility and bone density loss, more clearly documented, and advocates for comprehensive evaluations and non-invasive approaches like psychotherapy.”
As soon as a page or article refers to ‘anti-trans’ you know, it will be a bunch of lies.
They know that most people are NOT against transgender people, but being accepted doesn’t suit their narcissistic need for victimhood*. It’s why their comments are full of hyperbole, like the claim that they are being ‘erased’. That’s absolute tosh.
There are loads of ‘old school’ transexuals who pose no problem to women or children as they use their own male facilities. I am mutual follows with several on twitter.
Women’s real concerns are reflected in this meme I made, but transactivists aren’t prepared to consider things from a woman’s view:
“Wear what you want, chop bits off if you are an adult, we don’t care. BUT a male who crosses women’s boundaries without permission is, by definition, a predator. How he identifies is irrelevant. This is being anti predator, NOT anti trans. Live your life, enjoy your existence, just not in women’s spaces.”
I’m a PERF, not a TERF.
(*) they try to identify into every victim group. They even claimed that they were persecuted by the Nazis, when the truth is that many Nazis themselves celebrated transvestism. There is a (very short) list of cross dressers who were murdered in concentration camps. In an analysis of the names, it was proved that these people were murdered because they were Jewish, gay, or some other group Nazis hated. Nothing to do with their clothes choice, but that didn’t stop the activists claiming their victimhood. I have an image of the symbols that those in concentration camps were forced to wear. I asked activists many time to point out the trans one. None did.
The Wikipedia article on SEGM is very biased. It predominantly cites sources from organizations that have been closely associated with humans rights, gender-affirming care, identity politics or intersectionalism for years in order to accuse SEGM of having a transphobic agenda.
Unfortunately, this Wikipedia article illustrates very well what happens when a critical issue is hijacked by political activists who have immunized themselves against any criticism.
A”I” only regurgitates whatever input it’s given. Remember the old computing adage, garbage in, garbage out?
AI is given ratings for the sources being used. Wikipedia is usually given a high rating. Publications that many consider “woke” are usually given high ratings.
ChatGPT on “gender affirming care”.
“There is substantial evidence that gender-affirming care is associated with improved mental health (less depression, less suicidality), better quality of life and better body image in many trans people.
There is no strong evidence of widespread harms from such care in adults based on current studies.
For youth, the evidence is more limited, but early results are promising—that access to gender-affirming treatments correlates with better outcomes.”
This gender-nonsense — it poisons the biomedical discourses at a critical time when — now more than ever — we need trusted voices regarding public health and policy. We all have seen too many examples of hitherto trustworthy sources degrading their credibility by falling in line with gender woo, and now there are some trenchant analyses of this sad development.
One more thing: reading the linked paper motivated me to check out the website of the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine. The contents are informative, includes a link to something referred to as the Hierarchy of Disagreement, a worthwhile read, as well as other contents of that informative nonpartisan site.
That’s the organization condemned as a hate group by the august Southern Poverty Law Centre. The SPLC Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval helped local and national trans activists in Canada intimidate McMaster University into abandoning and disavowing a series of academic reviews SEGM had commissioned Mac’s Evidence-Based Medicine group to do.
Yes — The SEGM website has information about the SPLC crapola and a detailed response. Again, gender-woo can taint anything. SPLC once did very good work.
The medical profession has bathed itself in shame, by allowing such terms as AFAB/AMAB to become commonplace. Every doctor knows that sex is observed at birth (not always accurately), not assigned. Yet, inaccurate terms such as AFAB and AMAB have become standard.
In rare cases, sex observed at birth is actually wrong. I am referring to CAIS, Swyer’s syndrome, and 5-ARD. Human chimeras (they do exist, but are very rare) are even harder to classify.
For a good example of Swyers’s, check out Sara Fosberg on YouTube. Since she if very public, I am using her name.
Whenever I read about how Johanna Olson-Kennedy held her paper back “because the results… were not in line with what author thought gender activists wanted to see”, it reminds me of an acquaintance who abandoned a PhD thesis when “7/8ths complete” and began anew with a completely different topic. The 7/8ths was (I thought) far better scholarship than the subsequent thesis. When asked why the first was abandoned, the answer was “it wasn’t giving the results I wanted.” To older generations, this signalled a lack of the maturity/integrity/intellectual honesty needed to be a scholar. In the past, such doctoral students were routinely blocked from completion and had to leave ‘ABD’. Whether it was because of financial rewards or some misguided sense of compassion or something else entirely, 20-40yrs ago universities instead started pumping them through to completion.
But it is hard today to find any common ground with PhDs who think that open-ended scientific discovery is a corrupting factor or too dangerous to permit.
The gender craziness continues. I watched a video of a woman being interviewed about something that had nothing to do with gender or sex.
In the introduction the male interviewer refers to the woman as “she.”
There were two comments about this: one said didn’t he know that the woman used “they/them” pronouns?
Another chastised the interviewer and told him to him work on his “pronoun awareness.”
I replied to each comment saying didn’t they know that Trump exploited the pronoun issue for his possibly most successful ad?
“Kamala is for they/them, I’m for you.”
So far, neither started an argument about it.
TRAs don’t usually understand irony. I have several screenshots calling for terfs to have their own bathrooms and not be allowed into women’s spaces. Errrr yes please 😂 I care about female safety so much that I will take a women only space with any name on the door, even ‘terfs’. 😈
+1
And you just know who will be banging on that door 5 minutes later….!
🎯
The medical profession has bathed itself in shame, by allowing such terms as AFAB/AMAB to become commonplace. Every doctor knows that sex is observed at birth (not always accurately), not assigned. Yet, inaccurate terms such as AFAB and AMAB have become standard.
In rare cases, sex observed at birth is actually wrong. I am referring to CAIS, Swyer’s syndrome, and 5-ARD. Human chimeras (they do exist, but are very rare) are even harder to classify.
For a good example of Swyers’s, check out Sara Fosberg on YouTube. Since she if very public, I am using her name.
I’ll look for her on YouTube. Thanks.