From http://www.tsroadmap.com/info/paul-mchugh.html

"Paul McHugh, M.D.is Henry Phipps Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Psychiatrist-in-Chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. A member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, McHugh is currently co-chairman of the Ethics Committee at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. He also serves on the board of The American Scholar. His writings include Genes, Brain, and Behavior (1991) and essays on assisted suicide and the misuse of psychiatry.

From A Brief History of Transsexuality

In the late 1970s, however, the climate began to change. The first signs were seen at Johns Hopkins, where the chairman of the Psychiatry department, Dr. Joel Elkes, was replaced by Dr. Paul McHugh. McHugh saw SRS as unnecessary mutilation, and set out to kill the program. He assigned Dr. John Meyer to do a long-term follow-up study of 50 transsexuals who underwent SRS at Johns Hopkins. Meyer's report, issued in 1977, claimed that SRS confers no objective advantage in terms of social rehabilitation for transsexuals. Although the paper was widely criticized as flawed, it led to the October 1979 closing of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic."

And from Dr McHugh himself:
"Psychiatric Misadventures" by Paul R. McHugh via http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/mchugh.htm

This interrelationship of cultural antinomianism and a psychiatric misplaced emphasis is seen at its grimmest in the practice known as sex-reassignment surgery. I happen to know about this because Johns Hopkins was one of the places in the United States where this practice was given its start. It was part of my intention, when I arrived in Baltimore in 1975, to help end it. "

He went in with a pre-conceived notion, and none of the scientific evidence, the peer-reviewed papers, the autopsy results or the latest MRI data has changed in mind one whit in over 30 years.

The Vatican did go to the most reputable scientist they could find. One who has a world-renowned reputation even now. The problem is that his views are so outside the mainstream on this area, he straddles the line between "eccentric" and "crackpot". Despite the mountain of evidence for biological causation, he insists that all psychiatrists have to do is find the right combination of drugs, therapy, and psycho-surgery and these crazy people will be cured. That the cause is psychiatric is not so much an article of faith, as an unarguable axiom to him. Because if not, I conjecture that he would have to admit just how much harm he's done, out of the highest of motives.

We need to know how to prevent such sadness, indeed horror. We have to learn how to manage this condition as a mental disorder when we fail to prevent it. If it depends on child rearing, then let's hear about its inner dynamics so that parents can be taught to guide their children properly. If it is an aspect of confusion tied to homosexuality, we need to understand its nature and exactly how to manage it as a manifestation of serious mental disorder among homosexual individuals. But instead of attempting to learn enough to accomplish these worthy goals, psychiatrists collaborated in a exercise of folly with distressed people during a time when "do your own thing" had something akin to the force of a command. As physicians, psychiatrists, when they give in to this, abandon the role of protecting patients from their symptoms and become little more than technicians working on behalf of a cultural force.

He's stuck in the 70's, and has learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing. It is no accident that his successors at Johns Hopkins continue to be employed as expert witnesses in anti-transsexual cases, because they are the only ones who still hold this view. It is also no accident that they admit to not being aware of the data that has come in in the last 15 years, that they do not subscribe to specialist journals on the subject, and are not involved in any specialist association dealing with the area. They continue to believe in phlogiston and malefic humours - or the psychiatric equivalent thereof.

And it is they who have the Vatican's ear, and who the Vatican relies on for scientific advice.

TS-Si is here to counter the Paul McHughs of the world, provide an honest broker for the scientific research on HBS, and be a voice of reason when speaking to political representatives, the general public, or social and religious leaders such as Pope Benedict. We have the science, we have the voice, we will not go silently into the night and cede the playing field to the uninformed, the religiously driven, or the politically motivated.

Paul McHugh is mentioned in other TS-Si.org articles that may be of interest.

"Background On Dr. John Money"
http://ts-si.org/content/view/1407/992/

"Briefing: Roman Catholicism And Harry Benjamin Syndrome (HBS)"
http://ts-si.org/content/view/2798/993/

"Washington State: Discredited Research, Religious Bias"
http://ts-si.org/content/view/1958/995/