The British Medical Journal (BMJ) has been accused of “abandoning science” after it rejected research from top academics over their views on gender identity ideology and the critical importance of ‘sex’ not being replaced by ‘gender’ as a category in social and medical research (Mail, Times Higher Education).
One researcher had his paper rejected because he was “opinionated” and had previously tweeted in support of author JK Rowling’s staunch defence of women’s sex-based rights and the ability of women to talk openly and without fear of negative consequences about those rights. The other’s research was taken offline by BMJ staff who accused him of being “transphobic” based on nothing more than a student paper article about him. Both academics saw the discussions in BMJ staff emails after making Freedom of Information requests.
The claims centre on papers submitted to BMJ Open by John Armstrong, a mathematician at King’s College London, and Michael Biggs, a sociologist at the University of Oxford.
In Dr Armstrong’s case, a paper co-authored with UCL sociology professor Alice Sullivan was submitted in July 2022.
The paper challenged a 2020 BMJ Open paper by US- and Hong Kong-based researchers that asserted institutions with Athena Swan accreditation had more diverse leadership teams. (Despite being set up to promote women in academia, in 2016 Athena Swan began recommending that higher education institutions collect data exclusively on gender identity, not sex.)
Dr Armstrong and Prof Sullivan claimed to identify a number of major statistical flaws in the original paper, and carried out a corrected version of the analysis showing that one of the key findings of that paper was simply an artifact of an invalid statistical methodology.
Following a largely favourable set of initial reviews, the co-authors revised and resubmitted their manuscript.
But although all four reviewers subsequently indicated they were happy for this revised manuscript to proceed to publication (e.g., “excellent paper, just what is needed in this area of research”; “the authors have done an excellent job of responding to editorial and reviewers”), it was then rejected by the journal’s managing editor because of “editorialising throughout the manuscript [which] was not appropriate for a research article” and because “conclusions are not supported by the data”. These criticisms were entirely unconnected to any of the issues the co-authors had been asked to address during the revision process.
Why did the editor follow his own judgement rather than that of the reviewers? What we know for sure is that emails obtained by Dr Armstrong through a subject access request (SAR) reveal a member of editorial staff telling a colleague that the “author’s social media account also coloured our impression of the manuscript as the author is very outspoken on issues relating to EDI [equity, diversity and inclusion]”, and claiming that Dr Armstrong had a “broader agenda, rather than just questioning the statistical approach taken on the original article”.
“Short version: he’s quite argumentative and opinionated. Here’s his Twitter,” one email summarised, referring to posts written in a time period when Dr Armstrong had retweeted J. K. Rowling’s well-known tweet in December 2019 in support of feminist campaigner Maya Forstater, who lost her job after posting several tweets critical of trans ideology and expressing her belief that sex is immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity during a conversation with a colleague.
Emails obtained by Dr Biggs using the same method show that BMJ staff had also raised concerns about postings attributed to the Oxford academic by a student newspaper in 2018, claiming that he was “known for being transphobic”.
It follows the rejection last year of a rapid review paper submitted by Dr Biggs that raised concerns that a UK census question regarding sex and gender might have been widely misunderstood.
According to BMJ staff emails, Dr Biggs’ scholarly research piece was “offensive”. It was also claimed that “he portrays trans individuals as uneducated and implies that they weren’t able to understand the question about gender identity on the census so answered incorrectly”.
But this is a laughable misreading of his research article, published in Sociology, which suggests that people who do not speak English as a first language may have answered the question in the 2021 census by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) incorrectly.
In 2021, the census explored gender identity for the first time, and Dr Biggs’s article revealed that the ONS’ question on gender was similar to a question proposed by Press for Change, a transgender campaigning group, in 2007.
Press for Change’s 2007 wording was: “Is your gender identity the same as the gender you were assigned at birth?” The 2021 census question asked: “Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?”
As Dr Biggs’ article in Sociology points out, when the question formulated by Press for Change was tested by NatCen, a not-for-profit research organisation, a focus group “accepted that non-trans people would not understand the question, especially if first language was not English”. One transgender respondent derided the question for its “ridiculous trans lingo” and it was eventually rejected by NatCen.
While investigating the strong association between suspect gender categories and English proficiency, Dr Biggs even asked the ONS to provide data on these two variables at the individual level, along with sex. What resulted was data showing that respondents who spoke English “not well” or “not well at all” were most likely to be counted as transgender: 2.2 per cent of them, as compared with 0.4 per cent of those whose main language was English or Welsh.
Speaking to Times Higher Education about BMJ Open’s extraordinarily politicised – not to say ill-informed – review process, Dr Biggs said the apparent “ideological filtering of submissions on transgender issues was concerning.”
Dr Armstrong added: “If a journal censors findings because they don’t like the results or they don’t like the author, it has abandoned science.”
