Losing sight of women’s rights
The authors of the paper issued a statement on the attempt to shut them up:
This time last year, our article ‘Losing sight of women’s rights: the unregulated introduction of gender self-identification as a case study of policy capture in Scotland’ was published in the journal Scottish Affairs.
A couple of months prior to publication, we were made aware of an effort from within the publishing house, Edinburgh University Press (EUP), to prevent publication on the grounds that our article was transphobic.
This clarifies a point I didn’t fully grasp via the Times article – EUP simply publishes the journal Scottish Affairs, it doesn’t edit it or oversee it. The officious complainer works for EUP, not for Scottish Affairs. That makes the intervention all the more ludicrous and outrageous.
When EUP senior staff received an internal memo with this accusation, which we strongly dispute and which was evidenced only by a disagreement over our use of the word “woman”, they shared it outside the organisation. Before doing so, they appear to have made no further assessment of its reasonableness and gave us no opportunity to comment. Without our knowledge, despite the article having been accepted for publication by the journal editor, EUP editors sent the unanonymised article to the University of Edinburgh legal team, on the basis that two of us were understood to be employees of the University.
EUP is on the record as having done this to establish whether the content of our article breached the University’s Dignity and Respect policy, an internal guidance document setting out behaviour expected of University staff and students.
This was an exceptional breach of normal practice.
The University legal team declined to give an opinion on compatibility with internal university policy, citing academic freedom and the right of the journal’s editorial board to publish. The EUP, quite exceptionally, also subjected the journal to questions about its internal processes.
It’s as if all the rules get re-written for this one tiny category of people – men who say they are women.
This was a shocking experience for the three of us, both at a personal and professional level, and also because of the implications for freedom of speech and academic freedom. We included an account of this episode in our submission to the Scottish Parliament on the Scottish Government’s Hate Crime and Public Order Bill, as we believe that had this happened with the provisions in the bill enacted, the proposed “stirring up” provisions could easily have been invoked by those making wholly unreasonable accusations against us, and the stakes would immediately have been much higher for all concerned, however much we contested the reading of our piece.
We remain grateful to the journal for standing by its original decision to publish.
Dr Kath Murray, Lucy Hunter Blackburn and Lisa Mackenzie
It’s grotesque.
WOW, that is an exceptional breach of ethics. I would be screaming bloody murder if an organization did this with one of my papers.
In my long history of peer-review from all angles, I never came across any back-door shenanigans like this. Very occasionally, a paper that passed review was recommended for rejection by a committee member on some grounds or other such as relevance. This was always treated very carefully to make sure the reasons for that recommendation were good ones (which were documented in the procedures for that journal or conference) and not ideological (usually, the work contradicted the committee member’s own work).
Even if the reasons seemed valid, a lot of care was taken before publication was refused. In fact, I don’t remember it happening even once.
I certainly never came across a situation where a random person swooped in and made ideological decisions outside of the review process. I would have made one hell of a ruckus if I had.
This is of course the Tuvel affair all over again; that that sad incident was not roundly rejected by all corners of academia (including by one P. Z. Myers, whose only commentary at all on the matter seemed to be “you can’t say this is a witch hunt against Tuval becuz there are real people in Africa getting murdered as supposed witches” and which comments section immediately devolved into a righteous relitigation of Ophelia’s harassment off of the platform) was an embarrassing indictment of just how ideological the academy has become.
Institutional capture indeed.
Seth, thanks for the reference to the Tuvel affair aka Hypatia transracialism controversy. I read up on that and found it interesting. It’s amazing how when people (supposedly, philosophers) are unable to provide a logical refutation of an argument they immediately take to threatening behavior to get the offending speaker to stop.
Latsot, if you have not witnessed these kind of shenanigans, then you are lucky. I am aware of several, including stories about the infamous Wakefield autism paper that should have gotten the editor fired, although in this case it was the other way around.
Two people I know were reviewers, who roundly rejected the paper citing grave concerns about methodology, result and conclusions. One said to me that they didn’t even think the introduction was good, failing to cite some seminal work that would have rather undermined his central premise. Two bad reviews from respected authors in the field should have been enough to kill it. Instead the editor (or more likely the associate editor) reviewer shopped until they got the number of reviews they needed to proceed to publication.
It was outrageously unethical behavior and it’s always been disappointing to me that the Lancet did not thoroughly audit their processes afterwards. Nor was the internal audit at the Royal Free any more than window dressing. Dismissing it as one bad apple, no attempt was made to discover how a bad apple was able to operate with impunity without ethics approval. Despite the fact they supported him long after it was clear something fishy was going on.
I’m an associate editor for a journal and I can tell you it’s hard getting reviewers. To collect as many as this one did, is very unusual, not to mention a lot of work. It still staggers me that every step of the peer review process, which is meant to prevent this kind of thing failed.
The same is true in this instance. If a paper has been accepted and does not contain lies or inaccuracies, how does someone biased get into the process?
Wo, that’s interesting. Ok if I make it a guest post? I ask this time to be on the safe side.
I don’t doubt it. In my field, of course, (computer science) there wasn’t much to gain from that kind of thing. I did come across a bit of pressure to accept papers from eminent computer scientists with little scrutiny or despite concerns, but it was easily ignored.
Hi Ophelia,
Yes, no problem. I don’t see that I wrote any identifiable information on anyone other than Wakefield himself. He’s not going to sue. And the editor’s name is public knowledge, although I am deliberately not naming him directly.
I would state that I am not a first-hand witness to these events. I am relating to you only what I was told, although I have no reason to doubt its veracity.
Thanks,
Claire
[…] a comment by Claire on Losing sight of women’s […]
Thanks Claire!