Renowned Doctor Slams Transgender Experimentation on Children

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BALTIMORE (ChurchMilitant.com) - A renowned psychiatrist is warning medical professionals to stop experimenting on patients in order to feed the transgendering craze.

On Tuesday, The College Fix published an interview with Dr. Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University and a charter member of the U.S. bishops' National Review Board and one of the original authors of the John Jay Report.

McHugh said his aim in speaking out is to stop people from falling for transgender ideology. He also wants medical professionals to hold themselves to higher standards of evidence when determining treatments for their transgender patients.

"You can think whatever you want without proof. Be my guest," he said. "But don't ask me as a doctor to prescribe hormones or operate on you when I try to do things which are for your benefit."

There are a growing number of medical professionals that are sounding the alarm on transgendering protocols they say have not been proven — and McHugh is among them.

"Many people are doing what amounts to an experiment on these young people without telling them it's an experiment," McHugh said. "You need evidence for that and this is a very serious treatment. It is comparable to doing frontal lobotomies."

Dr. Michelle Cretella, the executive director of the American College of Pediatricians (ACP), has been one of the leading voices in calling out the danger in transgendering children — that stance landing the ACP on the Southern Poverty Law Center's list of hate groups.

Cretella came under fire in 2017 for blasting the transition protocol as "child abuse." She said the one-two punch of puberty blockers plus cross-sex hormones results in permanent loss of sexual function and sterilization.

She added there is a "serious ethical problem" with doing this to children who are not as capable as adults to assess risk.

Endocrinologists are also warning there are no published long-term studies documenting the side effects. The amounts of cross-sex hormones needed to produce the opposite-sex look are many times higher than diseases of the endocrine system that lead to early deaths.

Patients considering transgendering are often not told of these risks.

"They're going to be in the hands of doctors for the rest of their lives," McHugh said, adding, "Many of them are going to be sterilized, not able to have their own children, and many will regret this." He added, "Can you imagine having a life where you need to seek doctors all the time, for everything, just to live? Getting your hormones checked, getting everything checked. That is something doctors should like to spare people of."

McHugh also agreed with medical professionals, including the American Psychological Association, that acknowledge there are often mental health conditions present in people suffering gender dysphoria. McHugh is not alone in his opinion those should be studied and addressed first.

"I think their mental problems, often depression, discouragement are the things that need treatment," not gender dysphoria, he said, adding:

I'm not positive about this. It's a hypothesis, but it is a very plausible hypothesis, and it would explain why many of the people who go on to have treatment of their body discover they are just as depressed, discouraged and live just as problematic lives as they did before because they did not address the primary problem.

McHugh also agreed with the medical professionals who are studying the possibility of a social contagion effect to transgenderism.

"I believe that these gender confusions are mostly being driven by psychological and psychosocial problems these people have," he said. "That explains the rapid onset gender dysphoria Lisa Littman has spelled out."

Littman, a researcher at Brown University, caused a worldwide commotion with her study that suggested some children suffer from "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" that is triggered when a trusted adult role model or other friends in the group identify as transgender.

This is also a risk for children with autism spectrum disorder who traditionally have a hard time with social interactions. Cretella told Church Militant last year that autistic children are at a higher risk for indoctrination.

"They are very aware of being different from their peers and/or isolated by them at a very young age. Consequently, when autistic children are exposed to transgenderism, it has a two-fold appeal," Dr. Cretella said.

These kids are being led to believe that their problems are because they are trapped in the wrong body, and "once they declare a transgender identity, they suddenly have a group of 'friends' the likes of which they have never experienced," she explained.

Littman found that when children are removed from the peer group, the gender dysphoria lessens and even disappears.

McHugh told The College Fix that he believes society will eventually look upon the transgender craze with a sense of shame.

"I believe it will be something like how we think of eugenics now," he mused. "We will come to regret it when we discover how many of the young people that were injured regret it themselves."

McHugh personally stopped the transgendering program at Johns Hopkins University for 38 years until 2017 when the hospital restarted the program against McHugh's opposition.

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