Content warning: This story contains sexual content.
Psychology Prof. Michael Bailey has dipped in and out of the spotlight for his controversial research and teaching methods for more than two decades.
But two years ago, Bailey’s work was called out for a new reason.
The article “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases” was originally published in March 2023 in Archives of Sexual Behavior, a Springer Nature medical journal focused on sex and gender. It was later retracted, the journal said, due to its noncompliance with consent policies.
Between the article’s publication and its retraction in June 2023, Bailey received mixed support and disapproval. But according to Bailey, the data in the article wasn’t even his.
Bailey said he met a parent who goes by the pseudonym Suzanna Diaz at a small academic conference. Bailey said Diaz expressed concern about rapid-onset gender dysphoria. She had already been collecting data when they met, but Bailey said he encouraged her to publish her work.
Diaz took his advice, publishing a paper on her findings with Bailey as a collaborator.
The reason for the retraction was because Diaz, who is not an academic, did not follow the usual journal standards for consent. Diaz’s data was not originally intended for publication in a journal like Springer, Bailey said.
Rapid-onset gender dysphoria
Rapid-onset gender dysphoria, a controversial theory proposed by former Brown University physician-scientist Lisa Littman, proposes that young people experiencing gender dysphoria are doing so because of social pressures, including friends or social media.
Bailey heard about Littman’s theory in the 2010s, after observing gender dysphoria patterns for a while, he said.
ROGD, Bailey said, is used to explain how adolescents with preexisting psychological issues “acquire” the idea that they are transgender. These psychological issues include emotional issues, autism, depression and anxiety, he said.
“There’s been an epidemic of gender dysphoria referrals since roughly 2010,” Bailey said. “A huge increase in referrals, especially for adolescent and young adult females.”
Many medical and psychological professionals have criticized the theory, including the American Psychological Association, Howard Brown Health, Illinois Psychological Association and many health care providers.
Littman later stated ROGD is not a formal diagnosis. Further, many experts question the “social contagion” aspect of the theory and state the overall dysphoria and referral data does not back up the claim.
Despite the contention around the theory, Bailey remained interested in studying ROGD.
“Interestingly and importantly, this idea simultaneously popped up in more than one member of a peer group, whereas, prior to 2010 — certainly prior to 2000 — the rate of transsexualism was very rare,” Bailey said. “One in 25,000 people or less. And it was suddenly becoming much more common than that. And you’d have several people in the same friend group.”
The paper Bailey co-authored sourced parents from online communities disapproving of gender-affirming care for trans children, which biased the results significantly, as the authors acknowledge in the methods section of the paper. Bailey and his co-writer did not actively recruit participants, which they state affected their data as well.
They propose, initially, two hypotheses to explain the rise in gender dysphoria. The first hypothesis states that despite the increase in referral to gender clinics, there has not been an increase in gender dysphoric adolescents, just an improvement in the support possible for transgender youth; alternatively, the second hypothesis states that gender dysphoria is on the rise, especially in those assigned female at birth. Bailey and Diaz tie the second hypothesis to ROGD.
According to Reuters, gender dysphoria diagnoses are on the rise, tripling between 2017 and 2021 in the United States.
The authors argued that parent reports are a critical part of psychology research and research surrounding ROGD. However, they acknowledged that parent reports are often dramatically different from the child’s actual experiences.
Diaz and Bailey’s 2023 study also left the definition of “rapid” or “sudden” gender dysphoria up to the parents. Experts have said that to parents, these diagnoses can feel “sudden” because parents are often the last people to whom trans adolescents come out.
In the paper, the authors state 57% of informants said their children had a history of mental illness, with parents of assigned female at birth children more likely to answer affirmatively. The parents also said that social transition, on average, worsened their child’s mental wellness. Additionally, 51.8% of parents responded that gender specialists or clinicians had “pressured” them to “transition their child socially or medically.”
Bailey said the retraction from Archives of Sexual Behavior was ideological in nature. He said that although the journal claimed the retraction was because of consent policies, researchers do not want to say they oppose an article because they don’t like the idea.
“Our article, like almost all articles in this domain, for sure, was far from perfect,” he said. “In our article, you read it, you will see we brought up all the flaws we could think about, and we discussed them and how would those have affected our conclusions and that’s the way you’re supposed to do it.”
Bailey said other researchers and LGBTQ+ organizations attempted to convince the journal to fire Archives of Sexual Behavior editor and Canadian psychologist Kenneth Zucker due to an alleged lack of integrity on transgender people.
According to transgender rights activist and film producer Andrea James, Archives of Sexual Behavior originally intended to suppress transgender people.
“A lot of people who are in psychology view gender diversity as a disease or a disorder, and they feel that gender nonconforming children who decide to make a transition are a bad outcome,” James said.
Retractions as ideology or method
Stetson University psychology Prof. Chris Ferguson has noticed an uptick in article retractions over the last few years.
Following the original retraction from Archives of Sexual Behavior, Ferguson and another member of the Current Psychology editorial board invited Bailey to write an opinion about his experiences for a special issue of the journal focused on retractions.
Peer reviewers approved Bailey’s article, but afterward, Ferguson said, the essay sat on the desk of Springer’s production team for three months. When Ferguson checked on the article, he said, they wanted to call his writing “commentary,” which Ferguson and Bailey agreed to.
But several months later, Ferguson woke up to an email from the Springer production team rejecting Bailey’s essay.
“There’s the perception that it was the topic,” Ferguson said. “Even though it got accepted by the Special Issue editors, it got accepted through by the journal editor, even the first level of production editor. … They still squished it, and the way they explained it was that they don’t publish editorials, which is absolutely not true, because there’s gazillions and gazillions of opinion articles throughout social science, including in psychology.”
According to Springer Nature Head of Communications for Journals Michael Stacey, editors are responsible for accepting content for journal publication. He stated the decision is “theirs alone” and while the editors consulted Springer Nature Research Integrity Group for concerns about the accuracy of “some” of the manuscript’s statements, the decision to rescind initial acceptance was the editors’ alone.
Following the rejection of Bailey’s essay, Ferguson resigned from Current Psychology.
He said it was on amicable terms, and he finished up the papers he was assigned before leaving fully.
“I’ve published on issues of free speech before in various contexts, and so to see something that appeared to be in opposition to that value, I felt like I just couldn’t look myself in the mirror and be a part of that anymore,” he said. “Where they had made a decision that was diametrically opposed to a foundational value that I have, I felt like I couldn’t be a part of that team any longer.”
Ferguson said Springer’s original retraction was based on a “technicality” that is not applied reliably across psychology papers.
He added that there is little consistency with how retraction standards are applied. The standards are officially decided by the Committee on Public Ethics, which state that retraction is “warranted” if there is “clear evidence” of major errors, fabricated statements or falsification affecting the results, as well as if there are “unethical research practices” or if the findings were plagiarized. Henchley said in an email to The Daily that Springer follows COPE standards and that they are done to “correct the publication record.”
As a video games specialist, Ferguson said he knows of multiple pivotal papers in his field that meet COPE standards for retraction but remain unaffected. Even in the extremes, Ferguson said there is “no reliability.”
“If you were to apply retraction decisions to (Bailey’s original) article to social science at large, it would be a bloodbath,” he said. “A majority of articles would have to be retracted. If the standards for retraction that we use in that article applied, it would be an absolute disaster for social science, because most articles couldn’t meet the standards that were applied to this article.”
Decades of research and teaching
Bailey has been a psychology professor at Northwestern since 1989, and through his time at the University, his approach and tactics have garnered attention.
In the early 2000s, while others struggled to obtain research approval from the University, he conducted some avant-garde research.
In one instance, Bailey performed a study recruiting female students through psychology classes in a multistage process. If they agreed to participate, they would watch “very explicit videos” and measure their own genital response using a photoplethysmograph.
“I had pushback in my department. Some faculty who are no longer here didn’t want me to do that because they were worried that there would be problems and it would mess up the ability of people to conduct research using the undergraduate population,” he said. “But the IRB was pretty helpful. That turned out okay.”
Early in the 2000s, Bailey published “The Man Who Would Be Queen,” which he said focused on male femininity, including “male-to-female” transgender individuals.
“The Man Who Would Be Queen” was controversial, though, with massive pushback and a wide variety of responses and allegations.
“That part of the book angered a subset of transsexuals so much that they tried to ruin my life,” Bailey said.
Following the book’s release, Northwestern’s Institutional Review Board Office investigated Bailey’s research. Bailey said it was because of allegations he’d done interviews without IRB approval.
In an email to The Daily, a University spokesperson declined to comment on Bailey’s IRB investigation, citing University policy to not comment on personnel matters.
Bailey claimed at the time that his book was not necessarily research, since he personally knew those with whom he’d spoken.
Former bioethics Prof. Alice Dreger conducted a separate investigation, in which she found there was no scientific misconduct because the study was not “systematic” in a “scientific sense” or able to be generalized scientifically.
In the early 2000s, James was one of the activists who called out Bailey’s research for being “irresponsible.”
“If you are writing and producing knowledge about a persecuted minority, your work has to be above and beyond in terms of ethics and confirmability and replicability, and it just has to be done in a way that does not cause harm,” she said. “And it’s fine if you have a conclusion that is not considered good optics. But the problem is, you have to have responsibility.”
Bailey reentered the spotlight in 2011 when he held an optional after-class demonstration in which a woman was penetrated by a sex toy as part of his Human Sexuality course. The Daily reported that around 120 students attended out of a 600-person class.
Apart from the demonstration, Bailey held other Q&A sessions with a variety of speakers, such as a panel of convicted sex offenders.
The class was not offered the following academic year.
Psychology evolutions
Psychology is amid a 15-plus-year shakeup period, according to Ferguson. Psychology has been facing a replication crisis; the field has significant false positives that are unreliable and unreplicable, despite being “sold” as true, he said.
“It’s been about 10% successful in the sense (that) nobody did good transparent science 15 years ago, and now maybe 10% of people are doing good, reliable, transparent research at this point,” he said.
According to Bailey, this crisis is spread across all social sciences, and psychology has been a leader in addressing it methodologically.
Another of Ferguson’s issues with psychology, one he said is potentially more glaring than replicability, is the falsified effects of research developments.
“We tend to find little, tiny, tiny effects and promote them as if they’re big deals, when they’re probably noise,” he said. “So probably a good chunk of psychological research is just noise, but we pretend that there’s real results.”
Ferguson said, however, the situation is analogous to arguing to a banker not to charge interest on loans because that inflation is advantageous for academics.
While fraud and clear mistakes are good reasons for retraction, Bailey said, there has been a spate of ideologically motivated retractions, which he finds symptomatic of a larger shift in academia.
Bailey said he has noticed younger researchers are more motivated by ideology than by the data.
“That is a very disturbing trend to me,” he said. “I don’t know of anybody, certainly including me, who wants to harm anybody with our research, but we have to be willing to find things that people may not want to hear and otherwise why should anybody listen to us? If it’s predetermined what we’re going to find based on what people want to hear, we have no worth, people should stop funding research and universities should stop doing it.”
Bailey said journals and publishers are becoming more ideological, citing Nature’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
He also said that a department’s ideology can be determined by its usage of certain vocabulary, such as the words “queer” and “problematize.” Bailey said psychology is becoming increasingly political, noting the increase in journal employees with email signatures featuring pronouns and Black Lives Matter symbols.
“Black Lives Matter is a political slogan,” he said. “It’s a group that is not an admirable group. … what does that have to do with scientific publishing? OK, Black Lives Matter and pronouns, I predict that by next election, pronouns won’t be a thing. … People will still use pronouns, but you will not say she/her, if that’s your pronouns. That’s a weird, unusual thing that started around 2020, and many people think that’s dumb and ridiculous, and yet there was social pressure to do it. I never did it.”
Ferguson said the reason psychology is so affected by outside perspective and ideology is because the topics are “emotionally valenced.” More than other sciences, such as biology, he said, there is a pressure to get it right because people care.
He said that pressure can be “distorting.”
“If you’re looking at cellular structures, Newt Gingrich doesn’t care about that, or Kamala Harris doesn’t care about that,” he said. “But if you’re doing research on transgender issues, Kamala Harris cares about that. And so does Ted Cruz. There’s a political pressure behind producing the correct results.”
Email: kaavyabutaney2026@u.northwestern.edu
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