Ex-psychiatrist-in-chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital is fighting for decades against transgender surgery as a solution to what he calls ‘a disorder of assumption.’ On June 12, there was an article published in Wall Street Journal where Dr. Paul McHugh said that ‘policy makers and the media do no favors either to the public or to the transsexuals’ by not treating transgender ‘confusions…as a mental disorder that requires treatment, prevention and understanding.’ Dr. Paul McHugh reports the best way to help kids fighting with their gender isn’t surgery but ‘devoted parenting.’ If to believe to McHugh, the ‘sense of being transsexual constitutes a mental disorder in two respects.’ He says the first is that ‘it doesn’t correspond with physical reality.’ But what is more important is that not treating transgender disorder in a proper way can cause grim psychological outcomes. In his work, McHugh takes a 2011 research that followed ‘324 sex-reassigned individuals’ from 1973 to 2003 in Sweden. According to that study, it discovered that ‘individuals who are transsexuals after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for suicidal behavior, mortality and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.’ The author also reported that their findings suppose that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as cure for transsexual people, and must inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this group of patients. The research, McHugh wrote in his work, discovered that ‘starting about ten years after having the surgery, the transsexual people began to feel increasing mental difficulties. Most astonishing, their suicide mortality increased almost 20-fold above the comparable non-transsexual people.’ McHugh reports that Johns Hopkins ‘launched a research in the 1970s having compared the outcomes of transgendered persons who had surgery with the outcomes of those who didn’t.’ ‘The majority of the surgically treated patients described themselves as ‘satisfied’ by the results, but their subsequent psychological and social adjustments were no better than those who did not take the surgery,’ he added. Thus, McHugh explained, ‘we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a ‘satisfied’ but still patient with problems seemed an inadequate reason for surgically normal organs.’ Paul McHugh is also known as a prominent Catholic who served on President George W. Bush’s Presidential Council on Bioethics, has reported about the Johns Hopkins research before. In a 2004 part for First Things, he assumed that medical and psychological professionals ‘have wasted scientific and technical resources and damaged our professional credibility having collaborated with craziness rather than trying to study, treat and prevent it.’ Other mental health experts have tested the effectiveness of sex-alteration operations. Keith Ablow said to LifeSiteNews earlier this month that a viral video considering a seven-year old kid trying to become male was more harmful than most media sources told. He said he believes that it’s possible that developing secondary sexual characteristics that match one’s DNA may in fact be a part of somebody becoming more comfortable with her or his birth-given gender. According to Ablow, ‘the aggression displayed by the LGBT society toward persons who question whether kids should be ready for having their genitals surgically changed and be injected with massive doses of hormones is such that clinicians are worried to continue searching for the truth.’ In his Wall Street Journal piece, McHugh shared that ‘misguided doctors at medical centers including Boston’s Children’s Hospital have started trying to treat’ transsexualism in youth ‘even though the drugs stunt the kids’ growth and risk leading to sterility.’ He also added that, given the chance, ‘close to 80% of such kids would abandon their confusion and grow naturally into grown-ups if untreated,’ and suggests ‘a better way to help these kids: with devoted parenting.’