Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, describes himself as a Democrat who is politically liberal, but culturally conservative, an orthodox Catholic who believes in family values, marriage, and the Marines.
McHugh, a key historical figure in the academic pathologization of sex and gender minorities, shut down the gender identity clinic at Hopkins basing his decision on research that showed that gender variance is essentially a lifestyle choice or an ideology, and that offering trans health services was effectively collaborating in a patient’s delusion. He described it as akin to giving liposuction to an anorexic person. “There is no gay gene. And there are factors more influential than biology.”
Transgenderism is a “mental disorder” that merits treatment, not surgery. “Surgery is not a solution for people who suffer a ‘disorder of assumption,’ the notion that their maleness or femaleness is differ than what nature assigned to them biologically.” The disorder, according to Dr. McHugh, is in the assumption that they are different than the physical reality of their body. It is a disorder similar to a “dangerously thin person” suffering anorexia who looks in the mirror and thinks they are “overweight.”
McHugh generally opposes sexual reassignment surgery for children citing studies that showed between 70 and 80 percent of children who express transgender feelings “spontaneously lose those feelings” over time. “Parents should refrain from surgery until the child is mature enough to make that decision for themselves.”
He has also warned against enabling or encouraging child who express transgender feeling because they are “susceptible to suggestion from the ‘everything is normal’ sex education foisted on the schools. According to Dr. McHugh, “diversity counselors” like “cult leaders” may “encourage these young people to distance themselves from their families. Even some doctors working with these children are administering “puberty-delaying hormones to render later sex-change surgeries less onerous, even though the drugs stunt the child’s growth and risk causing sterility.” It “comes close to child abuse.”
Adult males who choose reassignment surgery are either “conflicted and guilt-ridden homosexual Men” or “heterosexual and some bi-sexual males who find intense sexual arousal in cross-dressing.” Most were little changed in their psychological condition after receiving reassignment surgery, having much the same problems with relationships, work and emotions.
“Sex change is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is a civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.”
Needless to say Dr. McHugh is not a favorite among transgender activists, now allied with the gay liberation movement. Much like Time’s June cover story, ‘The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s Next Civil Rights Frontier,’ activist continue their argument that ‘sexual dysphoria’ represents a true conception of their sexual identity but, they have offered little, if any, evidence to refute Dr. McHugh’s diagnosis.
Concerning the attacks against him from the left, Dr. McHugh says that “anyone who wants to stick with tradition values is accused of being a biblical literalist or a homophobic racists, because, in part, of the more fundamental change in our society towards permissiveness, that is, easy divorce, cohabitation and concubinage, abortion, pornography, and euthanasia. The issue of the homosexual is not separate. It’s all part and parcel of the pandemonium that the permissive movement has brought. We have just licensed all kinds of behavior.”
According to Biber, a world renowned sex change surgeon, the only thing reassignment surgery changes is the patients medical records, birth record and his or her perception that a change took place Reassignment surgery is only a cosmetic procedure. No amount of surgery or hormone injections can or will ever change the birth gender DNA.
Activists also ignore the 31% suicide rate for those that underwent reassignment surgery. There has been no conclusive “OBJECTIVE” research in the last 40 years that has demonstrated that surgically changing genders is an effective treatment for all gender disorders, according to Doctor Biber. “The accepted standard of treatment of Gender Identity Disorder is controversial, its effectiveness is unsubstantiated, and it has no basis in science.”
