Former Chief of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Dr. Paul R. McHugh blasted the Left’s transgender movement, saying that those who enable the mental illness of transgenderism are “collaborating with madness.” McHugh warns against sex-reassignment surgery in particular.
The esteemed PHD has studied transgenderism and sex-reassignment surgery for 40 years, notes CNS News.
In the doctor’s book, The Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatry, McHugh says that he’s “witnessed a great deal of damage from sex reassignment.”
Psychiatrists have been preparing the mentally ill for life-changing surgeries instead of “studying the causes and natures of their mental misdirections,” he states. “We have wasted scientific and technical resources and damaged our professional credibility by collaborating with madness rather than trying to study, cure, and ultimately prevent it.”
Johns Hopkins Hospital previously provided sex reassignment surgeries in the early 1970s, per CNS News. “But after Dr. McHugh – psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital 1975-2001 — and his colleagues studied the issue further, they concluded ‘that Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness.’” The hospital eventually stopped providing the surgery.
“We psychiatrists, I thought, would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia,” said McHugh.
The doctor explained that trans people, those who don’t identify as their biological sex, exude behaviors of “sexual misdirection,” called “autogynephilia.” Such behaviors do not cease post-op:
For the post-surgery transgender men, data collected by one of McHugh’s colleagues showed that most of the patients did not regret the genitalia change “[b]ut in every other respect, they were little changed in their psychological condition,” said Dr. McHugh. “They had the same problems with relationships, work, and emotions as before.”
McHugh added: “We saw the results as demonstrating that just as these men enjoyed cross-dressing as women before the operation so they enjoyed cross-living after it,” he said. “But they were no better in their psychological integration or any easier to live with.”
The doctor concluded that providing a “surgical alteration to the body of these unfortunate people was to collaborate with a mental disorder rather than to treat it.”
Upon major findings, the Johns Hopkins Psychiatry Department “concluded that human sexual identity is mostly built into our constitution by the genes we inherit and the embryogenesis we undergo.” This made it “quite clear” that “we psychiatrists should work to discourage those adults who seek surgical sex reassignment.”
McHugh explained activists are incorrectly conflating sex-reassignment surgery with “gay liberation movements.” Trans activists “still argue that their members are entitled to whatever surgery they want, and they still claim that their sexual dysphoria represents a true conception of their sexual identity.”
The doctor argues that these same activists have provided “little evidence” to refute scientific arguments that transgenderism is a psychological disorder.
“One might expect that those who claim that sexual identity has no biological or physical basis would bring forth more evidence to persuade others,” concluded McHugh. “But as I’ve learned, there is a deep prejudice in favor of the idea that nature is totally malleable.”