CNSNews.com loves to promote Paul McHugh’s positions on transgender issues because they align with CNS’ anti-gay, anti-trans narrative and he has the weight of his association with Johns Hopkins University to lend gravitas (even though conservatives don’t care much for highfalutin schools like Johns Hopkins).
The latest attempt to do so is a Sept. 17 blog post by Craig Bannister touting that “Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and former psychiatrist–in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital, who has studied transgendered people for 40 years, believes that patients suffering gender dysphoria need psychological care – not gender reassignment treatment.”
You can see Bannister’s appeal to authority by invoking the Johns Hopkins connection and even by giving him a middle initial. Bannister noted that the McHugh interview was taken from a website called the College Fix, but he didn’t disclose the fact that it’s a right-wing website (proudly stating on its nameplate that it’s dedicated to “right-minded news and commentary,” and, yes, the italics on “right” are in the original).
And because the College Fix didn’t tell its readers that McHugh’s views have been criticized over the years for being outdated, Bannister doesn’t either. It’s been pointed out that while McHugh argues for “psychological care” for transgenders, neither he nor anyone else has developed”a way to actually talk a transgender person out of their gender dysphoria.” And Johns Hopkins has restarted the transgender reassignment surgery program McHugh suspended in 1979.
That tells us he’s very out of the mainstream with current medical thinking. But Bannister and the College Fix don’t want you to know that — he serves too important of a political purpose to them.