Stephen Gliske

A journal has retracted a controversial paper that questioned what it called the “existing dogma” about gender.

The article, “A new theory of gender dysphoria incorporating the distress, social behavioral, and body-ownership networks,” was written by Stephen Gliske, a physicist-turned-neuroscientist at the University of Michigan.

Gliske’s paper, which received a modest amount of media attention, argued for what he calls a “multisense theory” of gender identity. As he told Newsweek last December:

This new multisense theory of gender dysphoria connects the experience of gender dysphoria with the function of the associated brain regions and networks. This paradigm shift—from fixed anatomical sizes to dynamic activity in brain networks—means that there may be many more options to decrease the distress experienced with gender dysphoria than we have ever realized.

Gliske’s article was published December 2. Not long after, according to Gliske, the journal told him it would be correcting his article, which it did with the following notice on December 12:

Upon initial publication of the manuscript version of this article, several questions were raised about the validity of the conclusions, particularly the author’s proposed implications for clinical treatment. The editors conducted an independent review of the article in response to these concerns and determined that any clinical or treatment recommendations were, in fact, unsupported by the cited data, and therefore are inappropriate and should be removed. The author agreed with this conclusion and the final version of the article has been edited to remove these speculations, including the removal of the entire “Implications for Clinical Practice” section.

According to eNeuro at the time, at least, that was kosher, and well within its ambit:

This article was submitted, underwent double-blind peer review, and published as a Theory/New Concept article and as such, is not based on novel experimental data but serves to question existing dogma. With the unsupported statements related to clinical implications and treatments removed, the editors feel this article serves only to present a perspective through review of the available literature.

Critics of Gliske’s paper continued to lobby. They launched a petition on Change.org demanding that eNeuro retract the article. According to the petition — which now has nearly 900 signatures:

Beyond the numerous scientific and theoretical short-comings of this manuscript, the clear intent of the paper was to do harm to the transgender community, one of the most vulnerable communities across the globe. This was not only evident in the section on clinical implications that was removed, but in the basic assumption that transgender people are a deleterious deviation with a disordered network of brain regions which pervades the entire manuscript. This is not merely an example of difference in scientific opinion, but a direct attack on a vulnerable community.

Then in mid-April, the journal posted a stinging critique of Gliske’s work from an international collection of academics led by Troy Roepke, of Rutgers, one of the architects of the petition. In a comment to the journal, Roepke and colleagues wrote:

Gliske (2019) contains scientific errors and unacknowledged ethical consequences. Rather than developing hypotheses for the neuroscience of gender based on a dispassionate review of the evidence, Gliske (2019) reverses the scientific method and starts with an assumption that transgender modality (Ashley, 2021) constitutes a pathology. Gliske (2019) forces a selective reading of available data to espouse harmful (now-retracted) clinical recommendations which lack any basis in clinical practice. As a result, its silent thesis is that a trans person’s lived experience of their gender is in fact an illusion resulting from otherwise unrelated neurological anomalies, or worse, abnormalities. This is a weighty claim that requires robust evidence.

They followed that preamble with a long list of what they said were mistakes Gliske had made, which they stated would appear in a forthcoming article.

According to Gliske, the journal had on April 3 informed him of its decision to retract his paper. So the April 14 comments would seem to have been by that point moot.

That retraction notice reads:

Based on concerns about this article’s validity, the eNeuro Editorial Board commissioned an in-depth postpublication review of this article by qualified experts in the field and senior members of the Editorial Board. Their consensus is to retract the article “because of major flaws, including circular reasoning, the lack of supporting evidence in the literature, a noncritical use of the available literature, and confusion in terminology. […] The links drawn between at least two of the three networks are not compelling based on the small base of literature cited, especially since this literature is only of structural but not functional nature. Many of the present statements regarding functional implications are sheer conjecture. There is not enough evidence justifying this ‘new’ theory and how it would actually advance the field.” The full rereview synthesis statement is available online as Extended Data.

eNeuro’s editor-in-chief, Christophe Bernard, did not respond to a request for comment. [See update at end of post.]

Gliske sent us a link to a blog post he has written on Medium about the episode. In the post, he writes:

I disagree with their decision, and view the weaknesses they list as easily fixed and insufficient to merit retraction. It seems that during the first peer review process and the board’s review at the time of the correction, my theory paper was correctly evaluated as a theory paper, as a new way at looking at previous data. To me, the last round appears to have evaluated the paper as if I was trying to prove the theory true. It of course failed that metric, as it is just a theory and proof can only come from new experiments.

Gliske also noted that the post-publication reviewers labeled parts of his work as ‘disrespectful’ and ‘ludicrous’:

I recognize that it may appear disrespectful to scientifically study whether individuals with gender dysphoria have limitations in their ability to sense their own gender. However, since we do not know the true cause of gender dysphoria, it is not disrespectful.

We can’t comment on the merits of Gliske’s paper as a work of science. But we do feel comfortable saying that the journal appears to have badly botched this case. It admitted reviewing Gliske’s manuscript and accepting the article as a “theory/new concept” piece — one “not based on novel” data but which “serves to question existing dogma.”

In other words, it can’t fairly hide behind the claim — which it now seems to be making — that it had inadvertently accepted a poorly-done study. Indeed, as eNeuro boasts on its website:

At the core of eNeuro is a commitment to provide authors with a fair assessment of their work, with any additional experiments requested thoroughly justified, while maintaining high standards of peer review.

After publication based on that first review, Gliske’s paper then passed — more or less — a second round of reviewing, with a small but significant change, before being executed by a final review.

So, either the initial round of peer review and editing failed or the second round failed, or both failed. The end result is a journal that looks inept and an author who’s thrown under the bus.

We see this sort of thing not infrequently. “Wait, all of those people are angry at us. We’d better retract this paper and blame the author for slipping one by us.” At least some journals offer a mea culpa — even if it takes years. The clock starts now.

Update, 5/1/20, 1130 UTC: Bernard, the journal’s editor in chief, forwarded our request for comment to the Society for Neuroscience, which publishes eNeuro. A spokesperson sent us this statement:

The Gliske “A New Theory of Gender Dysphoria Incorporating the Distress, Social Behavioral, and Body-Ownership Networks” paper published in eNeuro in December 2019 has been retracted. Per eN Editor-in-Chief Christophe Bernard, “Upon careful consideration by the eNeuro Editorial Board, I commissioned a thorough re-review of the Gliske paper by three unbiased outside experts to ensure proper procedure for papers on sensitive subjects. As a result of these re-reviews, the reviewers agreed unanimously that the paper should be retracted based on major scientific flaws.” The retraction statement and further reviewer comments can be viewed on eNeuro.

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