Professor Sallie Baxendale who recently published a systematic review of the evidence on the impact of puberty blockers on cognitive function, (reviewed in a recent post on our website), has written an article in Unherd, about the difficulties she had in getting her paper published.
Why did three journals reject my puberty-blocker study?
In the article Prof. Baxendale says of her original paper:
The paper explained in relatively simple terms why we might think that blocking puberty in young people could impact their cognitive development. In a nutshell: puberty doesn’t just trigger the development of secondary sex characteristics; it is a really important time in the development of brain function and structure. My review of the medical literature highlighted that while there is a fairly solid scientific basis to suspect that any process that interrupts puberty will have an impact on brain development, nobody has really bothered to look at this properly in children with gender dysphoria.
She was surprised at the paucity and low quality of the evidence:
I was surprised at just how little, and how low quality, the evidence was in this field. I was also concerned that clinicians working in gender medicine continue to describe the impacts of puberty blockers as “completely physically reversible”, when it is clear that we just don’t know whether this is the case, at least with respect to the cognitive impact.
Yet this was not the only troubling aspect of her project
The progress of this paper towards publication has been extraordinary, and unique in my three-decades-long experience of academic publishing.
The paper has now been accepted for publication in a well-respected, peer-reviewed journal. However, prior to this, the manuscript was submitted to three academic journals, all of whom rejected it.
Prof Baxendale then goes on to explain the process of peer review, the kinds of reasons that papers get rejected, such as not providing new information or insight, not being well designed, using poor methods, or not able to justify their conclusions from the data presented, and explains that this is all standard practice and an effective method to ensure papers that are published contribute to our collective knowledge and understanding. She said that while imperfect, anonymous peer review remains the foundation of scientific publishing.
But she explains that the reasons for rejection of her paper were not in the above categories:
I have never encountered the kinds of concerns that some of the reviewers expressed in response to my review of puberty blockers. In this case, it wasn’t the methods they objected to, it was the actual findings.
The rest of the article outlines the objections and reasons for non publication. In our view these rejections amount to an insidious form of cancel culture: scientific papers that don’t produce findings in line with some pre-determined dogma are simply not allowed to see the light of day. Fortunately for Professor Baxendale, and for us, one academic journal had the courage to publish her paper.