Dr. Paul R.
McHugh, the Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins
University and former
psychiatrist–in-chief for Johns
Hopkins Hospital ,
who has studied transgendered people for 40 years, said it is a scientific fact
that “transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become
men.”
All such
people, he explained in an
article for The Witherspoon Institute, “become feminized men or
masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they
‘identify.’”
The idea
that one’s sexuality is a feeling and not a biological fact “is doing much
damage to families, adolescents, and children and should be confronted as an
opinion without biological foundation wherever it emerges,” said Dr. McHugh in
his article, Transgenderism:
A Pathogenic Meme.
“I am ever
trying to be the boy among the bystanders who points to what’s real,” said Dr.
McHugh, who is also professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns
Hopkins. “I do so not only because truth matters, but also because
overlooked amid the hoopla—enhanced now by Bruce Jenner’s celebrity and Annie
Leibovitz’s photography—stand many victims.”
“Think, for
example, of the parents whom no one—not doctors, schools, nor even
churches—will help to rescue their children from these strange notions of being
transgendered and the problematic lives these notions herald,” warned McHugh.
They rarely
find therapists who are willing to help them “work out their conflicts and
correct their assumptions,” said McHugh. “Rather, they and their families find
only ‘gender counselors’ who encourage them in their sexual misassumptions.”
In
addition, he said, “both the state and federal governments are actively seeking
to block any treatments that can be construed as challenging the assumptions
and choices of transgendered youngsters.”
“As part of
our dedication to protecting America ’s
youth, this administration supports efforts to ban the use of conversion
therapy for minors,” said Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to President
Obama, as quoted by Dr. McHugh in his article.
However,
there is plenty of evidence showing that “transgendering” is a “psychological
rather than a biological matter,” said Dr. McHugh.
“In fact,
gender dysphoria—the official psychiatric term for feeling oneself to be of the
opposite sex—belongs in the family of similarly disordered assumptions about
the body, such as anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder,” said McHugh.
“Its
treatment should not be directed at the body as with surgery and hormones any
more than one treats obesity-fearing anorexic patients with liposuction,” he
said.
In fact, at
Johns Hopkins, where they pioneered sex-change-surgery, “we demonstrated that
the practice brought no important benefits,” said Dr. McHugh. “As a result, we
stopped offering that form of treatment in the 1970s.”
In recent
years, though, the notion that one’s sex is fluid has flooded the culture. It
is “reflected everywhere in the media, the theater, the classroom, and in many
medical clinics,” said McHugh.
It is
biologically false that one can exchange one’s sex, explained McHugh.
“Transgendered
men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men,” he said.
“All (including Bruce Jenner) become feminized men or masculinized women,
counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they ‘identify.’ In that
lies their problematic future.”
When “the
tumult and shouting dies,” McHugh continued, “it proves not easy nor wise to
live in a counterfeit sexual garb. The most thorough follow-up of
sex-reassigned people—extending over 30 years and conducted in Sweden , where
the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered—documents their
lifelong mental unrest.”
“Ten to 15
years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone
sex-reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers,” said
McHugh.
Nonetheless,
the false “assumption that one’s sexual nature is misaligned with one’s
biological sex,” can be treated with therapy and medication, said McHugh.
He further
stressed that, “What is needed now is public clamor for coherent
science—biological and therapeutic science—examining the real effects of these
efforts to ‘support’ transgendering.”
“But gird
your loins if you would confront this matter,” warned Dr. McHugh. “Hell
hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle.”
Dr.
McHugh’s article, Transgenderism: A Pathogenic Meme, can be read in
full at the
website of The Witherspoon Institute.
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