Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former
psychiatrist-in-chief
for Johns Hopkins
Hospital [1] and
its current
Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, said that transgenderism
is a “mental disorder” that merits treatment, that
sex
change is “biologically impossible,” and that people who promote sexual
reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental
disorder.
Dr.
McHugh, the author of six books and at least 125
peer-reviewed medical articles, made his remarks in a recent commentary
[2] in the Wall Street Journal,
where
he explained that transgender surgery is not the solution for people
who suffer
a “disorder of ‘assumption’” – the notion that their maleness or
femaleness is
different than what nature assigned to them biologically.
He also
reported on a new study showing that the
suicide rate among transgendered people
who had
reassignment surgery is 20 times higher than the suicide rate among
non-transgender people. Dr. McHugh further noted studies from
While
the Obama
administration,
“This
intensely felt sense of being transgendered
constitutes a mental disorder in two
respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply
mistaken –
it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can
lead to
grim psychological outcomes.”
The transgendered person’s
disorder, said Dr.
McHugh [1], is in the
person’s
“assumption” that they are different than the physical reality of their
body,
their maleness or femaleness, as assigned by nature. It is a
disorder similar to a “dangerously thin” person suffering
anorexia who
looks in the mirror and thinks they are “overweight,” said McHugh.
This
assumption, that one’s gender is only in the mind
regardless of anatomical reality, has led some transgendered
people to push for social acceptance and affirmation of their own
subjective
“personal truth,” said Dr. McHugh. As a result, some states –
The
pro-transgender advocates do not want to know,
said McHugh, that studies show between 70%
and 80% of
children who express transgender feelings “spontaneously lose those
feelings”
over time. Also, for those who had sexual reassignment surgery, most
said they
were “satisfied” with the operation “but their subsequent psycho-social
adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery.”
“And so
at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment
surgery, since producing a ‘satisfied’ but still troubled patient
seemed an
inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs,” said Dr.
McHugh.
The
former Johns Hopkins chief of psychiatry also
warned against enabling or encouraging certain subgroups of the transgendered, such as young people “susceptible
to
suggestion from ‘everything is normal’ sex education,” and the schools’
“diversity counselors” who, like “cult leaders,” may “encourage these
young
people to distance themselves from their families and offer advice on
rebutting
arguments against having transgender surgery.”
Dr.
McHugh also reported that there are “misguided
doctors” who, working with very young children who seem to imitate the
opposite
sex, will administer “puberty-delaying hormones to render later
sex-change
surgeries less onerous – even though the drugs stunt the children’s
growth and
risk causing sterility.”
Such
action comes “close to child abuse,” said Dr.
McHugh, given that close to 80% of those kids will “abandon their
confusion and
grow naturally into adult life if untreated ….”
“’Sex
change’ is biologically impossible,” said
McHugh. “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 civil-rights matter and encouraging
surgical
intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental
disorder.”