Too many issues
David Gorski’s statement on why he retracted Harriet Hall’s review of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage:
After careful review, the editors of SBM decided to retract this book review. Because we allow trusted authors to publish without prior review for the sake of efficiency and timeliness, occasionally corrections need to be made post-publication. In this case we felt there were too many issues with the treatment of the relevant science, and leaving the article up would not be appropriate given the standards of SBM.
Already there are false accusations that this move was motivated by pressure from readers. This is not the case. SBM had and never will cave to outside pressure. We have endured a great extent of such pressure, including the threat of lawsuits and actual litigation.
It didn’t occur to me it was pressure from readers, because I already knew Gorski is all-in for the trans ideology.
Further, any attempts at portraying this retraction as censorship are also false. This has nothing to do with silencing opinions or perspectives, but rather is entirely a matter of quality control. SBM is first and foremost about high quality scientific evidence and reasoning to inform medical issues, and we felt the article in question was below the minimal acceptable standard for SBM.
He can say that; we don’t have to believe it.
Me? I think that if it was really quality control, he would have taken specific objections to Hall and asked her to edit them.
Quite so. In the interim I’ve read the review and written a post saying just that. I can see one area where clarification would be useful: there’s a string of generalizations and we can’t tell if they’re Shrier’s or Hall’s or a mix of both. But given the background it’s hard to believe that’s all it was about.
Has there ever been a scientific theory — let alone a respectable scientific theory with an impressive consensus behind it — which did not have clear definitions of the most basic terms? Ask proponents of the “science of transgenderism” to define
Gender
Sex
Man
Woman
without circularity, contradiction, cloudiness, compound meanings easily conflated, and character aspersions on whoever asked for clarification, and if you receive an acceptable response you will be luckier than me.
If they’re out there, most passionate proponents are unaware of them. They instead tell me we need to get away from quibbling about precise terminology and look at real people who need attention and care.
In a scientific theory.
I’ve been reading SBM for years. Dr. Hall’s review of Shrier’s book looked to me to be typical of Dr Hall’s book reviews.
I’m not buying Dr. Gorski’s claim that her review “was below the minimal acceptable standard for SBM.”
Gorski has an obvious agenda, the mealy mouthed excuse doesn’t disguise that in the least.
Karen @ 4 – Ok so there goes the sliver of possible truth in Gorski’s claim. It is a perfectly cromulent way to do book reviews: the New York Review of Books specializes in them: reviewing a book or collection of books as a springboard to an essay on a broad subject. If that’s Dr. Hall’s usual practice then Gorski’s got nothing except the obvious agenda.