Psychiatrist Champion of Gender Reality and Patient Well-Being, Vindicated at 94
Our longtime intellectual ally, Dr. Paul McHugh, just received the Medal for Intellectual Freedom from the American Academy of Sciences and Letters!
Healthcare betrayed my family. As the parent of a trans-identifying child, I have lived under a dark cloud battling for my child against a harmful and extreme overvalued belief. It’s been a long haul with little encouragement: everything everywhere colludes in the naive young-adult’s delusion of living as another sex, of solving every psycho-social problem, and of bringing happiness while “being a transgender person” and believing that “trans medicine” offers all the answers! BS.
But Dr. McHugh’s award gives me hope. Let’s make his vindication count. Now is the time to turn things around and shut down the John Money clinics for good. All of them.
Let’s all read and promote Sohrab Ahmari’s gripping account [free link] of Dr. McHugh’s long battle against gender medicine, celebrating his long truth-telling career and the award he just won at age 94 – a decade after he became the trans movement’s Enemy Number 1. Some excerpts:
Dr. Paul McHugh, then head of psychiatry at the Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, made the decision to shutter [the Johns Hopkins University’s sex-change clinic] in 1979. The move “wasn’t controversial” at the time, McHugh tells me in a Zoom interview this week. There were dissenters, to be sure, not least John Money, the sexologist who’d established the unit a decade and a half earlier. But “all the other people at the hospital, even including many of the plastic surgeons, agreed.” [background on John Money from Reduxx]
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A colleague’s systematic follow-up study found that subjects who’d undergone reassignment didn’t show much by way of improvement in their “interpersonal relations” and overall well-being.
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about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable nontransgender population.
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“affirming” psychiatry actively colludes in the delusion and even justifies radical bodily modification to give it a semblance of “reality.” “It’s the idea,” McHugh tells me, “that if your sense of yourself and the facts about yourself diverge, it’s the sense of yourself that [the clinician] has got to go with.” He adds: “That’s a kind of old idea, too. It goes way back to the Gnostics” — the Late Antique heresy — “where it was in a sense the spirit, not the flesh, that mattered.”
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as the fog of gender fanaticism lifts, McHugh looks like the one who remained clear-eyed. His triumph is a testament to the enduring capacity of rigorous, pluralistic scientific inquiry to self-correct, adjusting course in the light of the evidence, and withstanding even the most intense ideological agitation. “I think that really is the only way to go,” he says. “Realism and the recognition that all this disdain for traditional facts, biological facts in themselves, is not going to get anybody anywhere.”
We (or future generations) will look back on this time and consider it madness that we as a society allowed children (and adults) to be maimed by cross sex hormones and radical body modifications with the belief that they could literally transform into the opposite sex. It is Mengele-like thinking that infected the world. No small credit to Dr. John Money for his work in this area. Thank goodness for people like Dr. McHugh, a voice crying in the wilderness, who never gave up the fight. Now, for future generations to come to this realization, we all (parents and non-parents alike) need to keep fighting until this terrible mind virus that is trans ideology is completed eradicated. As for my two adult children lost in this maze of delusion, my son is a homophobic gay man, married to another man (who, like my son) is LARPing as a woman. My youngest, second daughter, was sexually assaulted by her paternal grandfather at age 8, then sexually assaulted on her college campus by a college employee (nothing was done by the college - they decided it was consensual) and she uses her faux identity to hide her female body from other predators. Only time will tell what impact both of these adult children’s choices will have on their children (my son has two children and my daughter one). The repercussions are never ending. Generational. I hope every professional - doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker, counselor, surgeon, pharmacist, and on down the line who has enabled this destruction pays a price for their complicity.
Dr McHugh’s voice was the first I heard— via WSJ article years ago, casting doubt and putting a line in the sand against affirming gender ideology. This is wonderful news for a still very cognizant and relevant man and professional in this field. Well-deserved.