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The Right’s Favorite Anti-LGBT Doctor Strikes Again

Dr. Paul McHugh has a long history of anti-science, anti-LGBT stances. That doesn’t stop conservative media from lauding his work.

Samantha Allen
08.23.16 1:45 PM ET

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08...again.html

Former Johns Hopkins psychiatry chair Dr. Paul McHugh has a long history of staking out anti-LGBT positions. But The Washington Examiner and other conservative media outlets would have you believe that McHugh’s statements on LGBT issues are significant because he is a “prominent psychiatrist.”

At least, that’s how the Examiner referred to him after he and Arizona State statistician Dr. Lawrence Mayer published a lengthy paper casting doubt on the scientific consensus around sexual orientation and gender identity.

That paper appears in a recent issue of a journal called The New Atlantis and it has already generated the predictable far-right lovefest.

“Almost Everything the Media Tell You About Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Is Wrong,” the Daily Signal gleefully declared. The Daily Signal is owned by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

The Christian Post weighed in on the paper, too, repeating the researchers’ claim that there is “No Scientific Evidence That People Are Born Gay or Transgender.”

There is plenty of evidence to show that this isn’t McHugh’s first anti-LGBT rodeo.

In 2006, he was quoted as saying that sexual abuse in the Catholic Church was the result of “homosexual predation on American Catholic youth,” as GLAAD noted. Four years later, he filed an amicus brief supporting California’s same-sex marriage ban, arguing that “sexual orientation is, in part, a choice.”

In 2014, McHugh wrote a widely-cited anti-transgender op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that contradicts position statements from several major medical organizations including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association

Most recently, in the spring of 2016, he helped write a position paper for the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), a small Gainesville, Florida-based organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has called “an anti-LGBT hate group.” That position paper called health care for trans youth a form of “child abuse.”

“It may be an intrinsic problem of American psychiatry to fall into a craze or cult-like misdirection once a decade,” McHugh previously told The Daily Beast about his involvement with that ACPeds paper. “Transgenderism seems to be this decade’s version.”

So it’s no surprise to see McHugh’s name crop up yet again in connection with another round of headlines questioning LGBT identities.

In their new paper, McHugh and Mayer express skepticism over the concept of “sexual orientation,” writing that “we may have some reasons to doubt the common assumption that in order to live happy and flourishing lives, we must somehow discover this innate fact about ourselves that we call sexuality or sexual orientation, and invariably express it through particular patterns of sexual behavior or a particular life trajectory.”


With regards to transgender people, they advocate taking “a skeptical view toward the claim that sex-reassignment procedures provide the hoped-for benefits.” They especially question the provision of health care for transgender children, writing that they are “disturbed and alarmed by the severity and irreversibility of some interventions being publicly discussed and employed for children.”

On all of these counts, McHugh and Mayer are at odds with the positions of major physicians’ associations.

The 117,575-member American Psychological Association (APA), for instance, has long acknowledged sexual orientation, defining it as “an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic and/or sexual attractions to men, women or both sexes.”

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