October 12, 2016 at 4:22 pm EST | by Steve Charing
Hopkins under fire for anti-LGBT report
Johns Hopkins, gay news, Washington Blade

The George Peabody Library of Johns Hopkins (Photo by Matthew Petroff; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

A petition signed by 670 people has demanded that Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Medicine publicly disavow the recent report by Dr. Paul McHugh and Dr. Lawrence Mayer that amounts to a “misguided, misinformed attack on LGBT communities.” The petition was signed by 264 alumni of Johns Hopkins institutions, 200 current students, 30 faculty members, and more than 100 staff, interns, residents and fellows.

The “special report,” which appeared in August in The New Atlantis, a conservative bioethics magazine, “falsely implies that children ‘are encouraged to become transgender’ and that young transgender children undergo medical interventions as part of affirming their gender identities,” says Tari Hanneman, director of the Health Equality Project at the Human Rights Campaign Foundation in a blog for HRC.

Furthermore, the report contends that being LGBT is caused by childhood sexual abuse; LGBT people have inherent psychological difficulties; and sexual orientation is a choice and can be changed.

HRC asserts that neither McHugh, a former psychiatrist-in-chief at Hopkins Hospital nor Mayer, a biostatistician, has conducted original research on LGBT people and neither has ever written about sexual orientation or gender identity in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

“This misguided, misinformed attack on LGBT communities under the protection of the Hopkins name must stop,” the petition states. “McHugh is acting against the recommendations of the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association and, as such, is acting on his own personal agenda and not one rooted in evidence. McHugh is tarnishing Hopkins and causing significant harm to LGBT communities within Hopkins and beyond. McHugh’s actions are an embarrassment to those within Hopkins and who have trained here.”

While the 116-page report attacks the broader LGBT community, it specifically targets transgender individuals.

“McHugh’s history reflects particular animus toward transgender people, collaborating with an organization deemed a ‘hate group’ by the Southern Poverty Law Center and penning opinion articles mocking people who transition as ‘caricatures,’ ‘counterfeits,’ ‘impersonators,’ ‘confused’ and ‘mad,’” says Hanneman.

Mayer served as a $400-an-hour expert witness for defending North Carolina’s discriminatory HB2 law in a federal civil rights lawsuit.

“If Hopkins leadership ignore their community’s call to correct the record—clarifying that McHugh and Mayer’s opinions do not represent it, and that its healthcare services reflect the scientific consensus on LGBTQ health and well-being—its [HRC] Healthcare Equality Index score will be reduced substantially,” says Hanneman.

  • Inkpen

    Instead of throwing a temper tantrum, HRC could commission an independent scientific study to refute the report.

    • lnm3921

      Yes, but not as fun as taking a tantrum. If Donald Trump can take constant tantrums, why can’t everyone else?

      • Inkpen

        Huh?

  • Leslie Gray

    It’s about time McHugh and his organ of misinformation got shut down.

    • dlampo

      Got shut down? You sound like a fascist.

      • Leslie Gray

        The conservative religious community are the fascists, with their demands for special rights to be able to inflict their current fashion belief system on literally everyone else including people that are not of the same beliefs as they are.

        NO, I am not a fascist. I am merely tired of the lies, twisted truths and other intentional misinformation that the bigot Paul McHugh and his friends keep promoting. Johns Hopkins needs to have the fortitude to denounce a liar whose actions a damaging to both the reputation of that institution and causing serious harm to transgender people merely because McHugh is a fundamentalist catholic.

      • uhhuhh

        You sound like the vacuous, gay Republican apologist for bigotry that you are.

        • dlampo

          I haven’t had a good laugh like that in a while. Too bad you’ve lost all capacity for rational thought, but thanks for your insights.

      • Katrina Rose

        “Got shut down? You sound like a fascist.”

        You sound like someone who believes Bernie Madoff and Enron should have been allowed to operate unimpeded.

        • dlampo

          Yep, that makes a lot of sense.

  • LesbianTippingHabits

    McHugh and Mayer are also parsimonious tippers – only the wait staff knows for sure.

    Remember, tips are good karma. And karma never lies. Thank you.

  • old married lady

    This is not the first instance of a doctor associated with this hospital acting in a biased fashion toward sexual/gender minorities.JH was the origin of the tragic “twins study” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer . It’s time this sort of thing stops.

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