The main output of my (now-completed!) dissertation on the history fo trans medicine is a book. And there are a lot of “paper projects”, too - things that don’t fit the book but are substantial enough to be worth formal publication. However, there are a lot of other things that aren’t quite that big, but nevertheless, are worth writing out. This is one of them.
As conventionally told, by writers such as Joanne Meyerowitz, the legitimacy of trans medicine received a big boost in 1966, when Johns Hopkins University announced the opening of a dedicated Gender Identity Clinic (GIC) to provide treatment. Just as big a step back occurred in 1979, when the University announced that clinic’s closure, popularly attributed to a (much-critiqued) study that claimed no substantial benefit to patients arose from treatment.
Virtually every element of this narrative has been pored over, critiqued, clarified and corrected, most importantly by Walker Magrath, and by Jacob Moses in his upcoming book on the history of regret as a concept in medicine. But one thing that has been addressed only implicitly is the role of Paul McHugh, the contemporaneous Phipps Professor of Psychiatry at Hopkins. McHugh stands out in the historiography of trans medicine as the figure ultimately credited with the clinic’s closure - a claim initially made by McHugh himself a few decades back. Since then, it’s been repeated by figures on both sides of the aisle, and more and more by McHugh, who has made a living (or at least, walking-around-money) as an expert witness against access to gender-affirming medicine. All of it backed by the repeated insistence that he was the one who closed the GIC.
The only fly in the ointment is that, other than McHugh’s testimony, there’s no evidence that this is true. At this point I’ve retrieved archival material from over 30 institutions relating to the history of gender-affirming medicine in this era, and undertaken 175 interviews, including with patients and providers from the Hopkins GIC. And there’s no trace in McHugh being involved in any of the various shifts in status that, taken together, led to the GIC closing. Not in interviews with the staff there; not in the archives of staff present during the closure; not even in the archives of John Money, a man so dedicated to preserving his own life for posterity that he, at one point, employed a research assistant as a personal archivist.
McHugh, I’m sure, was not supportive of the clinic: he was probably a passive roadbump in its continuation. But not a single trace suggests he did anything active to close it. Instead, my suspicion is simply that it behooves him to act as though he did; that the friends and enemies such claims attract are the ones it benefits him and his values to make.