The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has launched a smear campaign to discredit world-renowned psychiatrist Dr. Paul McHugh, who is the top mental health expert debunking the radical “gender ideology” embraced by transgenders and homosexuals to justify their deviant sexual behavior.

As one of the nation’s most aggressive homosexual-transgender organizations, HRC is waging an all-out political war on McHugh, who is recognized as one of the most prominent psychiatrists over the last 50 years. With an M.D., he teaches as a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, having served as psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital for a quarter of a century.

Slandering science

Americans for the Truth about Homosexuality (AFTAH) President Peter LaBarbera points out the ludicrousness of the targeting of McHugh, as witnessed through HRC’s attack-website called “McHugh Exposed.” It accuses the medical expert of peddling “junk science,” – even though he has received the National Academy of Science (NAS) Institutes of Medicine’s most prestigious award.

“It is an odd accusation to make against one of the most celebrated mental health professionals and researchers alive today,” LaBarbera insisted in his piece on LifeSiteNews. “Dr. McHugh’s professional biography reads like a who’s who of American psychiatry and medicine. A Harvard College and Harvard Medical School graduate, Dr. McHugh was Henry Phipps Professor and director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.”

Yet HRC attempts to discredit half a century of McHugh’s celebrated accomplishments that have served to forward the field of medicine.

“For years, Paul McHugh has used his platform as a psychiatrist affiliated with Johns Hopkins University to peddle myths about transgender people – not just in his writings, but in courtrooms and state legislatures across the country,” HRC’s “McHugh Exposed” page reads. “While he has no expertise in gender or sexuality, McHugh has publicly called transgender people ‘caricatures' and described them as ‘confused' and ‘mad.' In August 2016, he teamed up with Lawrence Mayer – a biostatistician who was recently paid $400 per hour to defend North Carolina's infamous anti-LGBTQ HB2 law in court – on a report mischaracterizing research on gender and sexual orientation.”

As payback for exposing the bad science behind transgenderism, HRC resorted to playing the intolerance card.

“McHugh's effort to give a veneer of academic integrity to transphobic junk science is part of a broader disturbing trend: the use of misleading, badly designed or completely unscientific ‘research’ to attack LGBTQ people and their families,” HRC continued. “In reality, McHugh’s personal views run contrary to the overwhelming medical consensus and the established standards of care endorsed by every major medical association calling for affirming and embracing LGBTQ identities.”

The radical Leftist group then incites its following to slander McHugh, as well – even though he continues to be at the forefront of his field.

“Paul McHugh’s junk science misrepresents and mischaracterizes existing medical and scientific research,” HRC concluded. “His work is being used to target and discriminate against LGBTQ people across the country. The harm is real, but his science is not. And it's time to call it out.”

Modern-day innovator in medicine

The well-established and respected NAS has recognized McHugh for numerous research discoveries over the years – ones of great magnitude in the medical field.

“[McHugh was] the first to describe increased cortisol secretion associated with depression – an accomplishment that led to the development of a test to identify serious depression by physical means,” NAS stated in a release. “His extensive work studying the control of food intake revealed how gastrointestinal and neurophysiologic mechanisms regulate caloric intake in primates and are disrupted in people with eating disorders.”

In addition, he was heralded last fall for his work in a special edition on sexuality and gender published in a nationally renowned scientific journal, where his work was shown to debunk unsubstantiated findings by pro-LGBT physicians who have been dedicated their careers to forwarding the normalization of homosexuality.

“McHugh [is] arguably the most important American psychiatrist of the last half-century – in the hope of improving public understanding of [human sexuality] questions,” the editors of The New Atlantis informed. “Examining research from the biological, psychological,and social sciences, [McHugh’s] report shows that some of the most frequently heard claims about sexuality and gender are not supported by scientific evidence.”

The journal acknowledged the controversial nature of McHugh’s findings, but stressed that his medical research is not geared to condemn those practicing alternative lifestyles – but to work toward a restoration of their psychological and physical health.

“McHugh’s report has a special focus on the higher rates of mental health problems among LGBT populations, and it questions the scientific basis of trends in the treatment of children who do not identify with their biological sex,” the editors continued. “More effort is called for to provide these people with the understanding, care and support they need to lead healthy, flourishing lives.”

Stating it how it is …

McHugh drew much praise from conservatives and condemnation from progressives after one of the nation’s leading daily publications published one of his revealing and insightful op-eds regarding human sexuality issues.

“[P]olicy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending, rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention,” McHugh explained in his Wall Street Journal (WSJ) piece titled “Transgender Surgery Is Not the Solution.” This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken – it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.”

He assured America that transgenders are not victims of an incurable medical condition.

“The transgendered suffer a disorder of ‘assumption’ like those in other disorders familiar to psychiatrists,” McHugh continued. “With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature – namely one's maleness or femaleness. Other kinds of disordered assumptions are held by those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, where the assumption that departs from physical reality is the belief by the dangerously thin that they are overweight.”

The medical doctor then assured that – opposed to popular teaching and politically correct ideology – changing one’s sex is “biologically impossible” for humans – or any other living creature, for that matter.

“People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa,” McHugh explained. “Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is a civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.”

He then stressed the dangers of encouraging people to attempt to change their biological sex by citing the results of a follow-up study conducted in the LGBT-friendly nation of Sweden.

“[Swedish researchers found that people who had] sex reassignment surgery [had a suicide death rate] almost 20-fold above the comparable non-transgender population,” McHugh divulged in the WSJ.

The physician likened pro-transgender school “diversity counselors” who urged “transgender” students to assume gender-confused identities to “cult leaders.”

“Eighty percent of very young, often prepubescent children [who believe they are in the wrong-sexed body] would abandon their confusion and grow naturally into adult life if untreated,” McHugh informed. “Misguided doctors at medical centers, including Boston's Children's Hospital, have begun trying to treat this behavior by administering puberty-delaying hormones to render later sex-change surgeries less onerous – even though the drugs stunt the children's growth and risk causing sterility.”

More evidence against transgenderism

American College of Pediatricians (AcPeds) President Michelle Cretella agrees with McHugh’s assertions about transgenders.

“Dr. Paul McHugh is a highly accomplished academic researcher and clinical psychiatrist,” she told LifeSite News. “I am an ordinary licensed general pediatrician who practiced for 15 years before dedicating myself full time to motherhood and evidence-based child advocacy in the American College of Pediatricians. We became good friends in part because we have the same enemies.”

Similar to McHugh, Cretella’s organization was targeted by an extreme liberal activist group.

“Among those shared enemies is the leftist Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which labeled Florida-based AcPeds a ‘hate group,’ along with dozens of other conservative, pro-natural-family organizations – lopping them in with truly hateful groups like the racist Aryan Nation and KKK as a way to destroy their credibility,” LaBarbera noted. “The media often report the false SPLC description as fact. In its attack-site against Dr. McHugh, HRC, echoes SPLC’s tendentious labeling, referring to Dr. Cretella’s group as ‘a recognized hate group that attempts to impersonate the legitimate American Academy of Pediatrics.’”

Cretella let the vitriolic rants roll off her shoulder.

“[HRC’s attacks are most often ad hominem, or else they are misrepresentations of science and of what we have actually written or said, Cretella concluded. “They are factually baseless. A quote attributed to George Orwell sums it up best: ‘In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.’ Such is the current state of medicine – indeed of our entire culture – on all matters sexual. Truth is the enemy of the sexual revolution. Reality itself must be suppressed for the full sexual agenda to be realized. Therefore, those who proclaim it will be relentlessly attacked until they are silenced.”