Gender dysphoria purely a ‘social craze’ that will lead to regrets: psychiatric expert
The “transgender” phenomenon is an “ongoing social and
psychological experiment” with children used as guinea pigs and which society
will come to regret, says an expert in gender dysphoria.
Moreover, evidence shows that 80 percent to 90 percent of children with gender identity
confusion “revert to their natal sex” if they are “left to their own devices,”
says Dr. Paul McHugh, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
“We’re doing experiments on these children,” said McHugh, who
was chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins for 25 years, and has more than 40
years’ experience working with people with gender confusion.
“We should tell everybody this is an experimental procedure
right now, and that experiment is not being done with controls. It’s not being
done with clear statements to the parents that we can’t tell what the outcome’s
going to be,” he told LifeSiteNews.
"A very large number of these families are going to find
that they’ve been misled or misdirected and that’s going to be a turnaround, as
often happens in these social crazes.”
Rocklin kindergarten transition
In a recent eruption of the social craze, Rocklin Academy
Gateway School in Sacramento is under fire for not forewarning parents a
5-year-old boy would be transitioning to a “girl” and his kindergarten
classmates told to treat him as such.
Several parents reported the transition, which took place just
before summer break, left their children traumatized and fearful they could
“change” to the opposite sex.
The school has countered “gender identity” isn’t sex-ed and
doesn’t fall under California’s parental consent and opt-out laws, and that the
state bans discrimination based on gender expression and identity.
It’s doubled-down on its position since school reopened in the
fall, with a first-grader ending up in the principal’s office after
inadvertently “misgendering” the boy on the playground.
Gender affirmation no help to a child
But children “don’t fully understand their sexuality until
puberty, because they haven’t developed to the point of really making that
connection,” says Dr. Paul Hruz, a pediatric endocrinologist at Washington
University in St. Louis.
"To push them in one direction or the other” is “at best
confusing to them” and “most concerning, it may influence the choices that they
make.”
Hruz co-authored an article with McHugh and Dr. Lawrence Mayer,
then scholar in residence at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
and now a professor at Arizona State University, arguing against hormonal
puberty suppression. They cited there’s little or no research on the
consequences of such radical intervention.
The article, published in the June edition of The New Atlantis, maintains
that children who revert to identifying with their natal sex do not need
ongoing hormonal intervention. What is most needed is therapy to identify and
resolve psychosocial factors that may be generating the condition.
The authors contend that supporting transgenderism in a child —
both by social affirmation and puberty suppression — “may drive some children
to persist in identifying as transgender when they might otherwise have, as
they grow older, found their gender to be aligned with their sex.”
Even among those who advocate hormone treatment, many “would
still have reservations about what’s going on at the younger ages as far as the
social affirmation,” Hruz told LifeSiteNews.
Based on data that 80 percent to 90 percent of children
ultimately revert to identify with their natal sex, the Endocrine Society’s
2009 guidelines cautioned against social affirmation of gender dysphoria in
prepubescent children, even while it endorsed puberty suppression for
adolescents, he said.
Dissenting views met with “soft terror”
But as the number of children seeking treatment for gender
dysphoria increases, the state is responding “as though we really had a
complete understanding of this condition,” says McHugh.
And anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy “suddenly
finds himself the subject of what you might call ‘soft terror,’” including
receiving “vile emails” and “people calling for you to lose your job,” he
added.
While there are those among his colleagues who agree with him,
many are “fearful of saying anything.”
Indeed, McHugh has been vilified by the media and
the transgender lobby for discontinuing sex reassignment surgeries in 1979
while chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins. (The university announced in April
it’s resuming such surgeries.)
He and Mayer also drew the ire of the LGBTQ lobby for
an article they published in the Fall 2016 edition of The New Atlantis that argued a number of assertions on
sexual orientation and gender identity are not by research — including the
notion people are born with a sexual orientation or gender identity.
The article was denounced in March in
an open letter signed by 600 academics and reputed healthcare experts as not
peer reviewed, and advancing conclusions contrary to the “current scientific
and medical consensus” on homosexuality and gender identity.
Experiment will be regretted
While McHugh says he’s called “‘transphobic’ now by these soft
terrorists,” he is in fact “on the side of the kids and their families … Your
heart goes out to them.”
The “only thing I’m doing, is challenging the treatments as experimental. … I believe in other experimental
procedures we have a standard approach, and it is not being used and people
will come to regret that.”
Hruz says much the same.
“It’s a problem of inaccuracies and misunderstanding that’s been
perpetuated, a smaller group of people that’s convinced a wider audience that
this needs to be done,” he said.
“The children don’t become the other sex, even if they have a
discordant gender identity and they socially transition,” added Hruz.
“A boy that identifies as a girl and dresses like a girl and
acts like a girl is still a boy from a biological standpoint. Stating otherwise
is scientifically inaccurate. We just need to keep reminding people of that.”
