Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Dr. Paul McHugh’s Junk Science Fuels Religious Right’s Longtime Attack on Trans Rights
May 16, 2022
By Bill Berkowitz
Unless you’ve been taking a deep dive into the increasing attacks on transgender and gender non-conforming people, the name Paul McHugh will not likely ring any bells. Dr. McHugh, however, a former director of John Hopkins University’s Department of Psychiatry and currently the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, has over the years become a key figure in the academic pathologization of sex and gender minorities, and one of the go-to guy for the Religious Right’s anti-trans attacks.
In an era of a record number of murders of black trans women, attacks on transgender people by state legislatures across the country, the shaming of transgender students at public universities by the alt-right and white nationalist groups, and a predilection for fake news and pseudo science, Paul McHugh has been stoking gender-identity hate, blazing a path of misinformation and disinformation. According to the Human Rights Campaign, “McHugh has publicly called transgender people ‘caricatures' and described them as ‘confused' and ‘mad.'”
He not only writes about these issues, but he’s also provided anti-trans testimony in courtrooms, and before state legislatures across the country.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed the Parental Rights in Education bill, which contains a provision that “prohibits a school district from encouraging classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.”
In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott is trying to criminalize providing care for transgender adolescents. Rachel Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, the highest ranking transgender official in U.S. history, recently wrote: "Trans youth in particular are being hounded in public and driven to deaths of despair at an alarming rate. Fifty-two percent of all transgender and nonbinary young people in the U.S. seriously contemplated killing themselves in 2020. Think about how many of them thought it was better to die than to put up with any more harassment, scapegoating and intentional abuse."
The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue recently castigated the Biden White House for being “rabid advocate[s] of transgenderism.” Donohue argued that “There is no such person as a transgender—you are either male or female—but there is such a thing as transgenderism: it is an ideology that promotes the fiction that the sexes are interchangeable.” In his statement, Donohue cited McHugh, writing: McHugh “maintains that transgender people suffer from a ‘mental disorder’ and that ‘the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken—it does not correspond with physical reality.’”
In recent months, there has been a flurry of legislation across the country intended to exclude transgender children from competing in sports with their peers (https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2022/05/06/transgender-athletes-and-a-national-history-of-exclusionary-practices-commentary/).
As CNN’s Devan Cole and John Selva reported, (https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/22/politics/indiana-transgender-sports-ban-veto-governor-holcomb/index.html) “The debate over the inclusion of transgender athletes, particularly women and girls, has become a political flashpoint in recent years, especially among conservatives.”
According to Cole and Selva, “Advocates of such measures have argued that transgender women and girls have physical advantages over cisgender women and girls in sports. But a 2017 report in the journal Sports Medicine that reviewed several related studies found ‘no direct or consistent research’ on trans people having an athletic advantage over their cisgender peers, at any state of their transition, and critics say this legislation would add to the discrimination that trans people face, particularly trans youth.”
And Then There Are The Murders
And there are the murders. According to the Human Rights Campaign, (https://www.hrc.org/resources/fatal-violence-against-the-transgender-and-gender-non-conforming-community-in-2021) “In 2020, HRC tracked a record number of violent fatal incidents against transgender and gender non-conforming people. A total of 44 fatalities were tracked by HRC, marking 2020 as the most violent year on record since HRC began tracking these crimes in 2013.”
“In 2021, despite limitations in reporting, HRC recorded the deaths of 57 transgender and gender non-conforming people, the largest number of fatal trans violence incidents recorded in a single year since we began tracking this violence in 2013. Here are some of the names of the transgender people killed in 2021:
-- Tyianna Alexander, who was also known as Davarea Alexander, was a 28-year-old Black trans woman.
-- Samuel Edmund Damián Valentín, a transgender man, was killed on January 9 in Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico.
-- Bianca “Muffin” Valentin, a Black transgender woman, was shot to death in Atlanta, Ga. on January 17.
-- Dominique Jackson, a Black transgender woman, was shot to death in Jackson, Miss. on January 25.
-- Fifty Bandz, a 21-year-old Black transgender woman, was shot to death in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on January 28.
-- Alexus Braxton, also known as Kimmy Icon Braxton, a 45-year-old Black trans woman, was killed on Feb. 4 in Miami.
-- Chyna Carrillo, who also went by Chyna Cardenas, was killed in the morning hours of February 18, 2021, in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.
-- Siblings Jeffrey “JJ” Bright, a 16-year-old trans boy, and Jasmine Cannady, a 22-year-old non-binary person, both from Ambridge, Pennsylvania, were killed on February 22.
-- Jenna Franks, a 34-year-old white transgender woman, was killed in Jacksonville, North Carolina in February.
-- Diamond Kyree Sanders, a 23-year-old Black transgender woman, was shot to death in Cincinnati, Ohio on March 3.
-- Rayanna Pardo, a 26-year-old Latina trans woman, was killed on March 17 in Los Angeles.
-- Jaida Peterson, a 29-year-old Black trans woman, was killed on April 4 in Charlotte, N.C.
-- Dominique Lucious, a 26-year-old Black transgender woman, was shot and killed on April 8 in Springfield, Missouri.
-- Remy Fennell, a Black transgender woman in her 20s, was shot to death on April 15 in Charlotte, N.C.
-- Tiara Banks, a 24-year-old Black transgender woman, was killed in Chicago, Illinois on April 21, 2021.
-- Natalia Smut, a 24-year-old Black and Puerto Rican transgender woman, was killed on April 23 in Milpitas, California.
-- Iris Santos, a 22-year-old Latinx transgender woman, was killed in Houston, Texas on April 23, 2021.
-- Tiffany Thomas, a 38-year-old Black transgender woman, was killed on April 24 in Dallas, Texas.
-- Keri Washington, a 49-year-old Black transgender woman, was killed on May 1 in Clearwater, Florida.
-- Jahaira DeAlto, a 42-year-old transgender woman, was killed on May 2 in Boston, Mass.
-- Whispering Wind Bear Spirit, a 41-year-old Indigenous non-binary person, was shot in York, Pennsylvania on May 3 and died early on May 4.
-- Sophie Vásquez, a 36-year-old Latina transgender woman, was shot and killed in Georgia on May 4.
-- Danika “Danny” Henson, who also went by Pryynce Daniel and Niia Da Don on Facebook, a 31-year-old Black transgender woman, was shot and killed in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 4.
-- Serenity Hollis, a 24-year-old Black transgender woman, was shot and killed in Albany, Georgia, on May 8.
-- Oliver “Ollie” Taylor, a 17-year-old white trans boy, died on May 19 after being kidnapped and shot on May 12 in Gervais, Oregon.
-- Thomas Hardin, a 35-year-old Black transgender woman, was killed on May 2 in York, South Carolina.
-- EJ Boykin, who also went by Novaa Watson, was killed in Lynchburg, Virginia on June 14.
-- Aidelen Evans, a 24-year-old Black transgender woman, was found dead in March in Port Arthur, Texas.
-- Taya Ashton, a 20-year-old Black trans woman, was killed in Suitland, Prince George’s County, Maryland on July 17.
-- Shai Vanderpump, a 23-year-old Black trans woman, was killed in Trenton, New Jersey, on July 30.
The maxim, “Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences,” embodies how McHugh’s work is being used by right-wing organizations and GOP politicians.
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