Donald Sullins

This is a study of what is often inaccurately called conversion therapy for sexual orientation, a very controversial topic in the culture wars. This draft restates with pertinent changes a version which faces pending retraction, three years after publication, due to the intervention of LGBT activists. (See Sullins DP, Rosik CH and Santero P. Efficacy and risk of sexual orientation change efforts: a retrospective analysis of 125 exposed men [version 2; peer review: 2 approved]. F1000Research 2021, 10:222 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.51209.2) This version revises some of the language, adds a sentence acknowledging the retraction of a previous study for unrelated reasons, updates the literature review, and corrects a coding error in the reported percentages in Tables 3, 5 and 6, which slightly strengthens the results. A short critical comment and our response follows the study.

The critical comment was from Dr. Lorenzo Lorenzo-Luaces, a well-known activist scholar who was involved in the retraction of Diaz and Bailey's ROGD study. For over a year the original publishing journal has refused to publish our response and (slightly) revised version responding to his critique.

Recently the journal has advised us it intends to retract the study on (what we judge to be) the pretext that we did not include a citation to a previous retracted study that used the same data but was retracted for reasons unrelated to the data. We have responded that 1) that is a novel and specious reason to retract a study; 2) if applied consistently, it would lead to the retraction of hundreds of other studies that have happened to use data that had previously been used in a study retracted for other reasons; and 3) however, if they think it is so important, we have no objection to including the desired citation, which consists of a single sentence, in a revised version of the paper. (The journal, F1000Research, is designed to accommodate multiple revisions in response to critical debate. We submitted a revised version, which is very similar to this one, using their protocols for doing so, but instead of following their stated revision procedure which is to submit the revision to the original peer reviewers for approval and comment, they summarily removed the revision from the process, without comment or trace.)

Rather than permitting the journal F1000Research to suppress evidence and debate on this issue due to ideological bias, we hope in this forum to instead enable more debate and consideration of the evidence, from any ideological point of view.