Five researchers at Norway’s national gender incongruence clinic are appealing a university committee’s finding they committed “gross negligence” and scientific misconduct after the group published several studies using the medical records of more than 1,000 minors without patient consent.
Two of the articles set out to count how many minors were referred to the clinic, characterize the mental health burden of trans patients and document their treatment trajectories and detransition rates. In June, a joint committee of the University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital (OUS) ruled five of the coauthors committed scientific misconduct for using the patients’ medical records without ethics approval or patient consent. The researchers maintain the work was for quality assurance, which in Norway doesn’t require consent. The committee ruled the work was research.
Two other articles violated research ethics standards in a “reprehensible” way, the committee found, but did not constitute misconduct. Those papers describe the outcomes of chest wall contouring and genital surgery.
The misconduct findings applied only to the five researchers based at OUS, who are linked to the National Center for Gender Incongruence, Norway’s central provider for gender-affirming care. They are pediatrician Anne Wæhre, child psychologist Trond Diseth, Kjersti Gulbrandsen, the head of the adult unit at the institution, and Ph.D. candidates Cecilie Bjertness Nyquist and Linda David.
They have since asked the finding of gross negligence be downgraded to negligence, according to David Banos, a statistician at the University of Oslo who collaborated with PKI Norge, the country’s largest patient organization for gender incongruence to report the violations of research ethics. The change would mean their actions would no longer be considered research misconduct, he explained.
One of the four articles has already been retracted and the second is also set to be withdrawn within days. The articles linked to the misconduct had three additional coauthors employed at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and therefore outside of the committee’s jurisdiction. That institute has begun a separate investigation.
The senior researchers on the articles, Anne Wæhre and Kim Tønseth, did not respond to our requests for comment. The university deferred to the hospital, which declined to comment on this story.
Banos first came to the case through the statistics in one of the papers. The 2024 article in European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry included a graph that projected a steep rise in referrals of transgender children. Referrals delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic “made the increase appear more prominent, persistent and predictable than the data justified,” Banos said. It “supported a narrative of continuing ‘sharp increase’ although the more recent data suggested that referrals may already have been stabilising,” he said. “This framing also encouraged an unnecessarily alarmist and pathologising interpretation of young transgender people.”
In a published response, the authors rejected the critique, saying their model adjusted for the pandemic, and that their study never attempted to estimate how many transgender people are in Norway.
Another issue was where the numbers had come from. In Norway, the national health portal notifies users when somebody has opened their records and why. Members of PKI began finding logs recorded as research by Wæhre, senior author of the article, as well as people who had never treated them, said Frende Lorentzen, board leader of PKI. The notifications from unknown people were “a clear sign that something was not as it should be,” Lorentzen told Retraction Watch.
When Banos and PKI looked into the research approvals, they “could not reconcile them with the nature of the data use,” Banos said, and reported their concerns to the university.
In September 2025, a joint committee of the University of Oslo, OUS and Akershus Hospital found serious violations of recognized research ethics standards in the 2024 article, and called the authors’ actions “reprehensible,” but did not find misconduct or recommend retraction because it was unclear whether the project fell under the jurisdiction of the regional ethics regulator, REK, explained Katrine Ore, secretary of the research integrity commission for the three institutions.
At the committee’s request, the group applied to REK for retrospective approval, which they refused in December 2025 because the project “could only have been conducted responsibly if it had been organized as a consent-based study,” and because patients probably wouldn’t have wanted to participate.
Following the finding, Banos and others at PKI obtained documents suggesting that years earlier, the researchers had sought ethical approval for “essentially the same research,” Banos said, but had been refused their request to waive patient consent.
In 2018, a Norwegian regional ethics committee (REK) approved Wæhre’s project to study minors referred to the clinic, as long as consent was obtained from each patient. The researchers asked to drop the consent requirement, but REK refused, as did a national ethics committee, because the records contained highly sensitive information from a particularly vulnerable patient group, they said.
A month after the rejection, the researchers established an internal quality register, called the Gender Incongruence Registry for Children and Adolescents, approved by the hospital’s data protection officer. The register pulled information from the records of about 1,300 minors the clinic had admitted since 2000. The undertaking did not require patient consent, because the researchers claimed the work was for quality assurance — in other words, looking into whether the care they provided was working and assessing their practices against international standards.
The switch from research to quality assurance became the basis of another complaint in October 2025 from PKI representatives and Banos, who again reported concerns about consent and that the violations of ethics had been intentional. They also brought forward three additional articles for review.
Wæhre and Tønseth, senior author of the two flagged surgical articles, maintained their work was quality assurance because there were no new interventions or patient contact, the purpose was internal service quality rather than new general knowledge, and it was different to the earlier application in which they requested an exemption from consent.
But the joint committee said in its June report it had “no doubts” that all four published articles were research since they aimed to produce generalizable knowledge, were published as original peer-reviewed articles in international journals, and formed part of a doctoral dissertation funded as research — meaning the researchers should have sought consent, or an exemption. But the committee did not establish intent. “The researchers may have acted incorrectly, without this necessarily implying that they have acted deliberately in bad faith,” the report stated.
“We do not agree that the researchers are only guilty of gross negligence,” Lorentzen said. “In our view, it is clear that they planned and conducted the project specifically to bypass ethics review and approval, and to avoid asking research participants for consent.”
The committee also found the anonymization inadequate, and said it was “objectionable” that individuals could identify themselves in the published material. Wæhre and Tønseth had argued a patient recognizing themselves in aggregate figures is not the same as the material being identifiable and pointed to the hospital data protection officer’s assessment that work’s benefit to society outweighed the privacy disadvantage.
Wæhre and Tønseth have been called out for what critics say are anti-trans views. The researchers warned of an “explosive increase” in the referrals of transgender children in a 2018 opinion piece— which Banos says caused unnecessary alarm. Waehre has also previously been criticized by transgender patient advocates for her involvement in the conference of an organization they believe to be anti-trans. PKI also claims the hospital has a history of mistreating trans patients.
Although the September 2025 committee did not recommend retraction, the Oslo/OUS joint committee recommended in its June report that the 2024 article in European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and another in Acta Paediatrica be retracted.
Acta Paediatrica retracted the 2024 paper in July this year, and editors apologized to “those whose integrity has been violated.”
The article in European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry remains intact, though Becky Shreeve, publishing director for biomedicine at Springer Nature said the retraction “should be completed imminently.”
For the other two articles under scrutiny which describe surgical outcomes for chest and genital surgery, published in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery–Global Open, the committee found the violations were “clearly reprehensible” but didn’t amount to misconduct and did not recommend retraction, but said the hospital should follow up on whether they need ethics approval. Lorentzen said the surgical papers include “highly sensitive” photographs of patients’ chests and genitals for which consent was not obtained.
The editorial office at Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery–Global Open told us that an institutional review is still underway, and once complete, “the journal will determine what editorial action, if any, is appropriate.”
All five researchers have appealed the misconduct and gross negligence findings. Banos and representatives from PKI have filed comments opposing the appeals. “We argue that the evidence even indicates intent,” he said. Banos expects the joint committee to uphold its assessment and refer the case up.
The hospital has not contacted the patients whose information was published, according to Lorentzen, and the researchers still have access to patient records. “It is incredibly disappointing that our members are still expected to show up to appointments with the involved persons,” Lorentzen said.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
What is the difference between gross negligence and negligence for these researchers? Does it shorten the time before they can apply for human-subject research again.
Legal language and scope obviously differs from nation to nation, so YMMV, but in the USA, “gross negligence” is often considered equivalent to “recklessness” and (also in the USA), the definition of research misconduct is that it is “committed intentionally, knowingly or recklessly” — that is, research misconduct is more egregious than mere negligence or sloppiness. So negligent behavior doesn’t rise to the level of research misconduct, while reckless behavior does. If you’re wondering what the heck reckless is supposed to mean in this context, the federal regulations that control the definition of research misconduct in the USA indicate that the type of recklessness that can be an element of research misconduct involves an “indifference to a known risk of falsification, fabrication, or plagiarism” (42 CFR part 93.231).
I hope commentators will take note that reason for the negligence charges were because the researchers used medical data of more than 1000 children and teenagers without consent.
It would be a shame if they just dropped culture war bullshit talking points about trans people.
it’s disingenuous to suggest these are mutually exclusive or unrelated. i’d have to imagine the average person would be more willing to violate research ethics for something they feel strongly about.
Perhaps so, but the actual misconduct would be the same if it was done for a study to determine whether or not, say, a new vaccine caused a third eye to grow in your navel.
They chose to violate the privacy of these children specifically because of their membership in a certain group. Of course it would be the same misconduct if they did it to some other patients, but they didn’t. We live in only one reality, the reality where this misconduct was motivated by these patients’ membership in a particular group.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study would also be the same misconduct regardless of what group it happened to, but it happened to a particular group for a particular reason and you would be remiss not to mention that.
PKI Norge needs some looking into. They are a political interest and lobby organization for trans issues. Banos has a trans partner, so likely has a strong interest in quashing research that does not fit his interests.
Yes of course, harmful research is fine against certain demographics and only people who personally care about those demographics could possibly object *eyeroll*