Renowned Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Paul McHugh said many in the medical and psychiatric industries “will come to regret” the ease with which they are now experimenting on children who claim to be transgender.

“Many people are doing what amounts to an experiment on these young people without telling them it’s an experiment,” McHugh said in an interview with the College Fix.

The psychiatrist said doctors who have gotten on board with the transgender trend and are treating young people with hormones “don’t have evidence that [the treatment] will be the right one.”

“You need evidence for that and this is a very serious treatment,” he added. “It is comparable to doing frontal lobotomies.”

A recently released study published at the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found 78 percent of college students who claim to have gender identity issues meet the criteria for at least one mental health problem, such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-injury, and suicidality, compared with 45 percent of students who are comfortable with their biological sex.

McHugh said he believes, for many of these young people, mental illness precedes their gender identity disturbances.

“I think their mental problems, often depression, discouragement, are the things that need treatment,” he explained, adding:

I’m not positive about this. It’s a hypothesis, but it is a very plausible hypothesis, and it would explain why many of the people who go on to have treatment of their body discover they are just as depressed, discouraged and live just as problematic lives as they did before because they did not address the primary problem.

McHugh observed this theory was suggested in a study conducted by Dr. Lisa Littman on rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD).

“I believe that these gender confusions are mostly being driven by psychological and psychosocial problems these people have,” he said. “That explains the rapid onset gender dysphoria Lisa Littman has spelled out.”

In 2018, Dr. Lisa Littman at Brown University set out to learn more about why the number of adolescent girls identifying as transgender at Britain’s Gender Identity Development Service had increased from 41 percent in 2009 to 69 percent in 2017.

The researcher said she had observed teens without a history of gender dysphoria – a clinical term describing psychological discomfort caused by a sense one’s gender is incompatible with one’s biological sex – were “coming out” as transgender “after a period of immersing themselves in niche websites after similar announcements from friends.”

In her study of 256 parents, which was condemned by LGBT activists, Littman found 87 percent of the young people were reported to have “come out” as transgender after increased time spent on social media and the Internet and after “cluster outbreaks” of gender dysphoria among their groups of friends. Most of the teens who ultimately identified as transgender also showed increased popularity with peer groups afterward, according to their parents’ reports.

Additionally, Littman found nearly two-thirds of the young people whose parents participated in the survey had already been diagnosed with at least one psychiatric developmental disorder prior to the onset of the gender dysphoria. For example, nearly half of the young people had already attempted to harm themselves or had experienced a trauma, suggesting the mental health issues preceded the reported gender identity disturbance.

Though Brown censored the report following protests by LGBT activists, the study was ultimately validated.

McHugh also told the Fix that children who receive experimental treatments after claiming to be transgender will likely have a life of involvement with the medical professions ahead of them.

“They’re going to be in the hands of doctors for the rest of their lives, many of them are going to be sterilized not able to have their own children, and many will regret this,” he said.

“Can you imagine having a life where you need to seek doctors all the time, for everything, just to live?” McHugh asked. “Getting your hormones checked, getting everything checked. That is something doctors should like to spare people of.”

The Johns Hopkins professor said he suspects history will treat the transgender trend much as it has the field of eugenics.

“We will come to regret it when we discover how many of the young people that were injured regret it themselves,” he said.