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By Root 1965 0

also lack maternal feeling and also desire other women, McHugh nonetheless maintains that the population of transsexual women ought to reflect statistically the same prevalence of maternal feeling and heterosexuality as natal women. “It’s our job as doctors to look at this issue closely when somebody says, ‘I’m a woman in a man’s body’ And when you look closely, these are the things that pop out immediately. These are not the subtle things about womanhood that women can pick out, but these are the things that anybody, common sense, would say ‘This person says that he’s a woman, but he’s a lesbian.’ Gee, you know, guys like women more than women like women. Secondly—geez, you know, where’s the feeling for children, maternal feelings? It’s zero here.”

Operating with this set of assumptions, McHugh and the researchers who shared them began to view the transsexual people who presented themselves at the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic with distaste. Clearly, using their criteria, these individuals were not women. Many of them were, in Paul McHugh’s view, “aging transvestites—the kind of people who had been going to Victoria’s Secret since they were twelve years old. And Johns Hopkins is not a branch of Victoria’s Secret!” McHugh characterizes Money’s early advocacy of transsexuals as an ideology. “It’s still an ideology,” he says. “ I believe in transsexuals, and I believe this is what they should be able to do.’ It was an ideology. It was not psychiatry and it was not medicine and it was not science.”

However, the research that might have made the study of gender variance something more substantial than an “ideology” came to an abrupt end when the Johns Hopkins clinic closed in 1979 and most of the other university clinics followed suit. “One of the things that I think was so tragic about SRS being forced off of medical school campuses is that it meant that almost all good research came to an abrupt end. That to me is a tragedy because there’s just so much research crying out to be done,” says Ben Barres of Stanford. At Johns Hopkins, research on gender variance took a conservative turn after the closing of the Gender Identity Clinic, one that denies the medical legitimacy of the condition that Harry Benjamin and John Money sought to define. “Our clinic is still looking at these patients; we still try to help them,” Paul McHugh says. “We tell them that we’re not going to do this surgery on them, because it’s not right. We don’t tell them to stop going to Victoria’s Secret. It’s up to them. But we tell them that they are not correct and that science doesn’t bear them out and their psychology doesn’t bear them out.”

Transsexual people themselves rue the changes at Hopkins set in place by McHugh. “Hopkins’s cachet with transsexual people desperately seeking services remained, so since 1979 those poor patients who didn’t know any better were seen at Hopkins’s Sexual Behaviors Consultation Unit (SBCU), which continued to do research on them but made them pay $150 per visit for that privilege,” says Jessica Xavier, a local activist who in 2000 carried out a needs-assessment survey on transgender health care in the District of Columbia. “They also stopped referrals for sex-reassignment surgery, which McHugh was quoted as calling ‘psychosurgery’ and hoped would go the way of pre-frontal lobotomies. If seen at the SBCU, a transsexual patient would be fortunate indeed to get referred for endocrinology.”

According to Paul McHugh, the incorporation of the diagnosis of transsexuality and later “gender identity disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual has only “sustained the misdirection” put in place by John Money and other researchers. “People were being harmed, subjected to a ferocious surgery and being encouraged in an overvalued idea that doesn’t for most of them make sense,” McHugh maintains. “Fundamentally at the root of all this is an idea that is shared by other people in the environment, that is, by other people like Dr. Money, for example—the idea that sex is socially assigned and that it could be changed. These