If we’d met at a bar, Dr. Paul R. McHugh would have ordered a glass of Irish whiskey—Bushmills Black Bush. “Only one though.”
Instead, I’m visiting the 94-year-old psychiatrist at his apartment in Baltimore where he’s lived since 2022, after his wife of 62 years died and he sold the family home.
We sat at his dining table, an elegant room full of books and family photographs. The wooden chairs, he said, are better for his back than the couch.
It’s not my first time meeting McHugh. He and I became fast friends in 2018 when I was starting out in journalism as a reporter for National Review. Back then, he was one of the few leaders in psychiatry speaking both skeptically and publicly about “gender-affirming care.” He told me then that lawsuits would be what finally brought down the transitioning of minors. And indeed, just last week, The Free Press reported on the first detransitioner in the United States to win a malpractice suit.
As early as in the ’70s, McHugh has been warning that hormones and surgery are not safe and effective treatments for gender dysphoria (or gender-identity disorder, as it was then known) for patients of any age. As head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins in 1979 he shut down sex-change surgeries after follow-up studies showed they weren’t improving patients’ mental health outcomes.
“I didn’t think it was such a big deal,” he said, noting that the idea of medical transition as a right—as opposed to a radical, and at best experimental, intervention—came only later.
