The paper that got Zucker fired was poorly researched

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Adam told me that when he walked into a room to find out about his referral, Zucker and others were there — “Doctors, researchers, who knows?” he said. Zucker quickly asked him to take off his shirt, and Adam, confused by the request but understanding that the clinician making it held great power over his future, complied, at which point Zucker laughed and called him a “hairy little vermin.”

As Science of Us reported two weeks ago, various details of Adam’s account indicated that he couldn’t have actually been victimized by Zucker. For one thing, the staffers he mentioned never worked in Zucker’s clinic. For another, the scenario itself never would have happened, since Zucker’s clinic never made surgery referrals (it did refer patients to the Adult Gender Identity Clinic at CAMH, which could later on refer them for surgery). Nor would a patient at Zucker’s youth clinic have been asked to provide proof of (adult) real-life experience.

Eventually, Adam and I were able to determine that it had likely been a different clinician elsewhere who had made the offensive remark, though at first Adam was unsure and maintained that maybe it had been Zucker after all. The eureka moment came during an improvised photo lineup. At one point I sent Adam a recent photo of “Smith,” the clinician who was the more likely culprit, without telling him who it was, renaming the file to avoid any giveaways. I asked Adam to open the attachment and tell me his reaction.

It was instantaneous. “Oh my gosh!” he said. “That second photo right there? Oh my God. Oh my God. Sorry. Yeah. Holy s**t. Holy s**t. Hold on, hold on. Why is that — oh my God. I, I, I feel — who is this, this one in the second photo? I feel like this is the guy.” I told him it was Smith. “That’s [Smith]? Okay, then it must have been [Smith]. Yeah, it was this man.” Given Adam’s inaccurate accusation of Zucker, I’m leaving certain details vague here to protect the identity of that other clinician (with whom I was unable to get in touch). But Adam is now sure that it wasn’t Zucker who made the offensive remark to him, and said he was planning on sending CAMH a note letting them know he had erred, though he didn’t respond to a follow-up email asking him if he had.

All it took to debunk Adam’s inflammatory claim was to listen to his story; almost immediately, details popped out that would have raised red flags for anyone familiar with the GIC. Some of those details, such as the name of the staff psychologist who didn’t work with Zucker and the surgery-referral context, were in the very email Adam sent Zinck — he forwarded me her thank-you note and his email was beneath it. But the reviewers, Adam said, “did not go into it, they did not ask me questions, they did not contact me further” other than sending the thank-you note. (The surgery-referral reference also should have jumped out at anyone who read the External Review and was familiar with Zucker’s clinic.)