Why Paul McHugh is a Menace to TGs

I feel the need to address the anti-transgender views of Paul McHugh that he recently wrote about in the Wall Street Journal. As a scientist I want to expose him as a scientist-pretender. For me, it is more than a scientific interest. His views had a direct negative impact on my wife’s health and my life.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an article by McHugh that attacked the idea of transgenderism and the current increase in acceptance of transgender human and civil rights.

McHugh is the former Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. He maintains that transgenderism is a disorder which results in confusion about sex. He believes that because transgenderism is all in the mind that it is not real and does not deserve human or civil rights. He believes that state laws banning “reparative therapy” for children are inappropriate. He cites studies that indicated that 70-80% of children reporting transgender spontaneously lose these feelings over time. He also cites studies which indicate that although post-op transsexuals reported satisfaction with transition, that they still had problems with social adjustment. McHugh used these studies to justify the abandonment of genital plastic surgery (SRS) at Hopkins back in 1979.

Without examining Chelsea Manning, McHugh concludes that the motivation to go through transition for her is that Chelsea believes that she would have it easier in a prison with women than men. He maintains that the cause of transgenderism is the influence of sex education, Internet chat rooms and diversity counselors that result in the recruitment of young people to become transgender. He believes that better parenting will cure transgenderism in children. Finally, he believes that transsexual transition merely promotes the transgender disorder because transition does not really change sex.

Paul McHugh pretends to be a scientist but he is only a pretender. His views come from his orthodox religious beliefs and his resistance to cultural change. His ignorance of science is deliberate. Accordingly, I will address the issues he brings up.

Transgenderism is not all in our heads. McHugh ignores behavior as evidence but it is the acid test of whether someone is transgender or not.  Expression of gender identity is important but as evidence it is not as strong as behavior. Behavior is objective and does not depend on introspection of one’s conscious thoughts which are subjective by their nature. The fact that people perform transgender behaviors in the face of severe cultural rejection and potential negative consequences, speaks to the importance of transgender behavior.

There are studies which show that for groups of clinical patients, including children, reports of transgender behavior decline over time. This is not surprising in light of the overwhelming cultural and family rejection of transgender behavior. There thus is an extreme bias for under-reporting transgender behavior. Many undoubtedly adopt a strategy of secrecy and lie. Many who were brought to the clinic by their parents have reached adulthood by the next time they are asked to report and see no reason to return to an “embarrassing” clinic.

The transsexual transition satisfaction studies that McHugh cites were done by a subordinate of his at Johns Hopkins. Subsequent studies have confirmed that outcomes for transsexual transition are good. It is clear that McHugh already wanted to end SRS at Hopkins when he came there. The studies just supported his previous decision. This was in the wake of the strong influence of John Money at Hopkins who championed SRS at Hopkins.  It would have been good politics for McHugh to try to erase Money’s influence.

I am tired of people like McHugh and TV talking heads like Keith Ablow making diagnoses and imputing motivation from afar. To me, this is remote diagnosis is unethical. There is evidence that Chelsea Manning knew that she was transgender long before she copied classified information and was subsequently convicted. Her requests for help from the U.S. Army were ignored but predate her arrest.

Although McHugh attributes the cause of transgender behavior as due to recruiting activities and believes that better parenting will eliminate the behavior, the science says otherwise. All existing studies of parenting refute this notion. There is strong evidence that transsexualism and transgenderism are due to the collision between biology and culture rather than parenting or recruiting. The biological factors of genetics and epigenetics form a gender predisposition, just like we have predispositions for handedness, language, music and art. In our binary culture, culture assigns people at birth to one of two gender behavior categories that are culturally created. We are a cis-gender culture which means that gender behavior categories are assigned by natal sex (which is also defined by culture). One of my earlier posts indicated that not all cultures are binary and cis-gendered. Transsexualism and transgenderism occur when one’s gender behavior is incongruent with one’s assigned gender behavior category but congruent with another gender behavior category. McHugh is responsible for making the transgender collision between biology and culture more injurious by propagating his orthodox religious beliefs and resisting cultural evolution.

My wife used to go to a psychiatrist who was trained at Johns Hopkins by McHugh. To help her treatment, I went to one of her sessions and admitted that I was transgender. She had regular bouts of anger which lasted no longer than one or two hours. They always occurred late in the evening. She would not remember what she did during those bouts of anger. I tried to convince her shrink that this was organic, that there was something about her biology that was not right but he refused to consider it. I finally called him at his office and his reaction was to call my wife and tell her that I had a disorder and should not be expressing an opinion. Essentially, because I was transgender, I was a non-person and ineligible to express an opinion. (For those who do not know my history, this is ironic because I do have a professional degree in understanding how the brain works.) Although she knew that I was transgender when we got married, the diatribe from the shrink started her into a panic which spread to her children and only recently got resolved. Turned out that her bouts of anger were the early signs of dementia, maybe Alzheimer’s. He never considered this possibility and so she did not receive the drugs which could have delayed the onset of Alzheimer’s until it was too late to have much effect.

Scientific pretenders do more than hold false views and attract attention, they cause real harm to real people.

Tags: Chelsea Manning, featured, John Money, Johns Hopkins, Keith Ablow, opinion, Paul McHugh, Transgender, transsexualism

Category: Transgender Community News, Transgender Opinion