In the space of just a few years, political correctness dictated that anyone who dared deviate from the rubric that individuals were whatever gender they called themselves (or had themselves surgically-altered to resemble) was “transphobic.”
This idea was based not off of science, which has been sorely lacking on the matter. Instead, it’s based off of a feeling — the feeling that if a man says they were really born a woman, damn the chromosomal evidence and call them a woman, or else we call you a bigot.
There’s a good reason why the cultural left doesn’t mention science when it comes to the transgender debate. That’s because it isn’t on their side.
In a 2016 piece for the Witherspoon Institute, one of the doctors who ran (and subsequently shut down) one of the pioneering sex-change surgery centers in America says that’s it’s an incontrovertible fact “transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men.”
Dr. Paul R. McHugh is a Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. He was also in charge of psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins, which pioneered sex change operations from 1975 to 2001.
In 1979, he made the decision to halt operations after he saw what science had to say about those suffering from what we now call gender identity disorder — and it’s decidedly different than what the left would have you believe.
Jon Meyer, who headed up the university hospital’s Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit, studied a small sample of patients who had undergone sex change surgery. According to the Baltimore Sun, he found that while the surgical procedure may be “subjectively satisfying” for patients, there was “no objective advantage in terms of social rehabilitation.”
“With these facts in hand,” McHugh wrote, “I concluded that Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness.”
Almost 40 years after he shut Johns Hopkins’ operation down, McHugh still believes that transgenderism is fundamentally an illness — and one that the media is enabling.
“The idea that one’s sex is fluid and a matter open to choice runs unquestioned through our culture and is reflected everywhere in the media, the theater, the classroom, and in many medical clinics,” McHugh wrote in the 2016 piece.
“It has taken on cult-like features: its own special lingo, internet chat rooms providing slick answers to new recruits, and clubs for easy access to dresses and styles supporting the sex change. It is doing much damage to families, adolescents, and children and should be confronted as an opinion without biological foundation wherever it emerges.”
Sadly, the medical field has been taken in by the fashion of the moment, according to McHugh, which he says has left him as a lonely voice of reason speaking truth to power.
“I am ever trying to be the boy among the bystanders who points to what’s real,” McHugh wrote. “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.”
Unlike the champions of transgender causes in the media, McHugh has 40 years experience working with transgender individuals. He’s not only seen the studies, he’s seen patients firsthand. Which means, of course, he’s considered a bigot by the left.
A 2015 piece on McHugh by liberal online rag ThinkProgress was unsubtly titled “Meet The Doctor Social Conservatives Depend On To Justify Anti-Transgender Hate,” presumably by someone who has zero experience working with transgender individuals and has seen roughly zero patients suffering from gender identity disorder. Another piece from the folks at The Daily Beast identified McHugh as an “Anti-LGBT Doc.”
McHugh insists that he’s “not against transgender people,” merely that he’s “anxious they get the help they need.” But that’s the kind of attitude that doesn’t get you plaudits from MTV or courage awards.
That shouldn’t matter in the medical field — but alas, it does, including at the program which Dr. McHugh used to run. Thirty-eight years after McHugh made the decision to shut the sex-change surgery unit down, Johns Hopkins resumed a transgender health service with an accompanying surgical program.
On so many issues, we’ve come to a point where popular feeling can override scientific debate, or even established scientific facts. In this case, the danger isn’t just to a society where modishness is valued over facts. The biggest peril is upon those who are suffering from gender identity disorder, people who are being fed lies by a media and medical community whose sails are so rigged to be blown wherever the winds of public opinion may take them.