From The Living Church-
Dr. Paul R. McHugh, a plenary speaker at this year’s Mere Anglicanism conference, served as the Henry Phipps professor of psychiatry, director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and psychiatrist in chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1975 to 2001. The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine named him distinguished service professor in 1998.
Lydia Evans, a lay leader in the Diocese of South Carolina, interviewed Dr. McHugh on a variety of topics. They began by discussing the work of Dr. John Money (1921–2006), who was perhaps best known for his supervision and study of David Peter Reimer’s gender reassignment.
When you joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1975, Dr. John Money had been there for nearly 25 years. How much of an opportunity did you have to interact with Dr. Money?
Oh, I had multiple opportunities. He was a member of my department, and I was responsible ultimately for [oversight] of his publications at the end of his life because the university had decided they were untrustworthy.
Were there opportunities to achieve a fairly direct exchange of worldviews?
I had enough of a fight putting an end to sex-change operations and saying that we were no longer going to teach sexuality to the medical students the way he was teaching it. It became clear that I was going to confront [Money’s] approach, and he would have to come and present his material at our grand rounds … but we didn’t have a public debate. He didn’t want to have anything publicly to do with my confrontation, as I was restricting more and more his enterprises. By the way, I certainly had plenty of support within [Johns Hopkins], and that could not have been done without some evidence that the patients weren’t any better for [gender reassignment surgery]. And there continues to be plenty of evidence.
While Money’s work significantly shaped Johns Hopkins’ reputation as an institution focused on progressive care for intersex and transgender conditions, your influence led to a decline in surgical intervention and seriously eroded earlier theories of the plasticity of gender identity.
That’s right. [Evidence from longitudinal studies such as Framingham suggests] that gender identity disorder may well be something imposed upon people out of their wish to live the roles, and the lives, within their social cluster.
How do you view the popular assumption that science has somehow proven that sexual orientation is determined early in childhood, if not before birth?
Well, as I have said, there is no gay gene. And there are factors more influential than biology. The best data, of course, [comes from the Framingham Study]. If you are a man and you grow up in a rural environment, you are four times less likely to have homosexual relationships than if you grow up in a metropolitan area. That’s not left-handedness. If you are a lesbian, you are much more likely to be college-educated. That’s not something that happens at conception. My point is that we now know that the environment is very important.
More here-
http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2010/1/26/dr-paul-mchugh-there-is-no-gay-gene
2 comments:
Have they found the straight gene?
It reminds me of an old joke brought home by my 12 year old daughter (now in college):
How do you tell the difference between male and female chromosomes?
You look under their genes.
I'll admit to arguing for "gender identity inclusiveness" in the church by the analogy to left-handedness. But I never argued without acknowledging the limitation of this -- indeed every -- analogy. By default analogies explain only something, sometimes just one thing and never everything, about a more complex matter.
Dr. McHugh claims that more lesbians occur in educated populations. Did he do any work to explore the possibility that intellectual development affects one's self understanding and often therefore one's self acceptance and often therefore one's more public expression of one's understood self? To me, intellectual development's relation to self expression is the more complex part of gender identity that the analogy to handedness makes no attempt to explain. The analogy of handedness was -- at least when I used it -- meant only to explain that sense of givenness or determinism common to both. By the way, when was the alst time you called left-handedness a disorder?
Dr. McHugh's statements are irresponsible abuses of data and worse the science he claims to practice.
Nice try Diocese of South Carolina, your mere science goes hand in hand with your mere theology. Neither is Anglicanism at its best.
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