ROCKLIN, California, August 29, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — The “transgender” phenomenon is an “ongoing social and psychological experiment” with children used as guinea pigs and which society will come to regret, says an expert in gender dysphoria.

Moreover, evidence shows that 80 percent to 90 percent of children with gender identity confusion “revert to their natal sex” if they are “left to their own devices,” says Dr. Paul McHugh, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

“We’re doing experiments on these children,” said McHugh, who was chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins for 25 years, and has more than 40 years’ experience working with people with gender confusion.

“We should tell everybody this is an experimental procedure right now, and that experiment is not being done with controls. It’s not being done with clear statements to the parents that we can’t tell what the outcome’s going to be,” he told LifeSiteNews.

"A very large number of these families are going to find that they’ve been misled or misdirected and that’s going to be a turnaround, as often happens in these social crazes.”

Rocklin kindergarten transition

In a recent eruption of the social craze, Rocklin Academy Gateway School in Sacramento is under fire for not forewarning parents a 5-year-old boy would be transitioning to a “girl” and his kindergarten classmates told to treat him as such.

Several parents reported the transition, which took place just before summer break, left their children traumatized and fearful they could “change” to the opposite sex.

The school has countered “gender identity” isn’t sex-ed and doesn’t fall under California’s parental consent and opt-out laws, and that the state bans discrimination based on gender expression and identity.

It’s doubled-down on its position since school reopened in the fall, with a first-grader ending up in the principal’s office after inadvertently “misgendering” the boy on the playground.

Gender affirmation no help to a child

But children “don’t fully understand their sexuality until puberty, because they haven’t developed to the point of really making that connection,” says Dr. Paul Hruz, a pediatric endocrinologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

"To push them in one direction or the other” is “at best confusing to them” and “most concerning, it may influence the choices that they make.”

Hruz co-authored an article with McHugh and Dr. Lawrence Mayer, then scholar in residence at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and now a professor at Arizona State University, arguing against hormonal puberty suppression. They cited there’s little or no research on the consequences of such radical intervention.

The article, published in the June edition of The New Atlantis, maintains that children who revert to identifying with their natal sex do not need ongoing hormonal intervention. What is most needed is therapy to identify and resolve psychosocial factors that may be generating the condition.

The authors contend that supporting transgenderism in a child — both by social affirmation and puberty suppression — “may drive some children to persist in identifying as transgender when they might otherwise have, as they grow older, found their gender to be aligned with their sex.”

Even among those who advocate hormone treatment, many “would still have reservations about what’s going on at the younger ages as far as the social affirmation,” Hruz told LifeSiteNews.

Based on data that 80 percent to 90 percent of children ultimately revert to identify with their natal sex, the Endocrine Society’s 2009 guidelines cautioned against social affirmation of gender dysphoria in prepubescent children, even while it endorsed puberty suppression for adolescents, he said.

Dissenting views met with “soft terror”

But as the number of children seeking treatment for gender dysphoria increases, the state is responding “as though we really had a complete understanding of this condition,” says McHugh.

And anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy “suddenly finds himself the subject of what you might call ‘soft terror,’” including receiving “vile emails” and “people calling for you to lose your job,” he added.

While there are those among his colleagues who agree with him, many are “fearful of saying anything.”

Indeed, McHugh has been vilified by the media and the transgender lobby for discontinuing sex reassignment surgeries in 1979 while chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins. (The university announced in April it’s resuming such surgeries.)

He and Mayer also drew the ire of the LGBTQ lobby for an article they published in the Fall 2016 edition of The New Atlantis that argued a number of assertions on sexual orientation and gender identity are not supported by research — including the notion people are born with a sexual orientation or gender identity.

The article was denounced in March in an open letter signed by 600 academics and reputed healthcare experts as not peer reviewed, and advancing conclusions contrary to the “current scientific and medical consensus” on homosexuality and gender identity.

Experiment will be regretted

While McHugh says he’s called “‘transphobic’ now by these soft terrorists,” he is in fact “on the side of the kids and their families … Your heart goes out to them.”

The “only thing I’m doing,” he told LifeSiteNews, is “challenging the treatments as experimental. … I believe in other experimental procedures we have a standard approach, and it is not being used and people will come to regret that.”

Hruz says much the same.

“It’s a problem of inaccuracies and misunderstanding that’s been perpetuated, a smaller group of people that’s convinced a wider audience that this needs to be done,” he told LifeSiteNews.

“The children don’t become the other sex, even if they have a discordant gender identity and they socially transition,” added Hruz.

“A boy that identifies as a girl and dresses like a girl and acts like a girl is still a boy from a biological standpoint. Stating otherwise is scientifically inaccurate. We just need to keep reminding people of that.”

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