When I Say Dr. Paul McHugh What Do You Think About?

If you have been in the trans community or an ally you probably know who is, and you probably know that to say the least he is not liked by us.

The Scary Science at Johns Hopkins University
Doctors at the esteemed institution are perpetuating dangerous myths about transgender people — and the university is not doing enough to stop them.The Advocate
By Brynn Tannehill
December 15, 2015

The name Johns Hopkins University connotes an institute of higher learning in medicine to most people. For those paying attention, it represents one of the most unapologetically transphobic institutions in America. JHU professors have headlined conferences on reparative therapy, cozied up with many Southern Poverty Law Center-certified hate groups, and taken money from the government to argue in court that transgender people don’t need medical care.

Administration has allowed staff members at JHU to ignore standards of care, reject evidence based medicine, and skip over guidelines of their professional organizations as long as the transgender community is at the receiving end of such malpractice.

Just prior to an October gathering of the World Congress of Families (which is an SPLC-certified hate group), a radio station in Utah held a pre-conference event called STAND4TRUTH 2015, sponsored by the Family Research Council (another hate group),  American Family Association (another hate group), and MassResistance (yet another hate group). Their speakers included some of the most radical anti-LGBT leaders from these groups such as Peter Sprigg, Peter LaBarbera, Michael Brown, Dave Welch, Matt Staver, and Brian Camenker.

And then there was Dr. Paul McHugh of JHU, prominently displaying his JHU credentials in support of reparative therapy and anti-LGBT animus.
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His words and actions toward the transgender community are the most radical and egregious, however.  He has compared medical care for transgender people to “the practice of frontal lobotomy.” McHugh’s disdain for his own patients is evident, calling them “caricatures of women” and pushing the demeaning narrative that all transgender women are either self-hating gay men or perverted heterosexuals. Worse, the damage McHugh has done to transgender health care is incalculable. McHugh shut down one of the few gender clinics in the U.S. in 1979, and his lobbying in 1981 was instrumental in getting a national coverage decision forbidding the government from covering gender-affirming care. It wasn’t reversed until 2014. As a result of his outspoken desire to see transgender people shoved back into the closet, Dr. McHugh has become the go-to “expert” for right-wing organizations.

He is used as an expert by Fox News, and in anti-trans court cases. He has twisted research data to justify his religious bias. In addition there are reports of mistreatment of trans patients,

Anti-transgender bias at JHU has a long and sordid history. The study McHugh ran in the late 1970s was deeply flawed and biased, having been designed to get a particular answer. As a result, the psychiatric community no longer considers this study persuasive or credible. Fellow psychiatry staff member Dr. Thomas Wise has also espoused similarly outdated, offensive views on transgender people, including a belief that transgender people need reparative therapy, and not affirming medical care…
[…]
The abysmal treatment of transgender people and failure to follow evidence-based medicine have been noticed by younger staff members at JHU. They are also upset at how McHugh, Wise, and other members of the psychiatric staff are protected by the administration. One younger doctor at JHU spoke with me on the condition of anonymity. He stated flatly that the institutions mistreatment of transgender people directly affected his decision to leave.

So if you are in Maryland around the Baltimore area pray that if you need medical treatment that they don’t take you to Johns Hopkins Hospital.