[2] He has described homosexuality as an "erroneous desire",[3] and supported California's 2008 same-sex marriage ban, claiming sexual orientation is partly a choice.
Thorn encouraged McHugh to develop a different career path, suggesting that he enter the field of psychiatry by first studying neurology.
[10] McHugh then attended the Institute of Psychiatry in London, where he studied under Sir Aubrey Lewis and was supervised by James Gibbons and Gerald Russell.
After reportedly being passed over for the Cornell chair in favor of Robert Michaels, he left New York to become Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oregon.
The book "seeks to systematically apply the best work of behaviorists, psychotherapists, social scientists and other specialists long viewed as at odds with each other".
[8][9] In 1992, McHugh announced that he was going to leave Johns Hopkins and accept a position as director and CEO of Friends Hospital in Philadelphia.
[23] The Council was charged with the task of making recommendations as to what the U.S. federal government's policy regarding embryonic stem cells should be.
[6][25] This appointment was controversial, as McHugh had previously served as expert witness in the defense of numerous priests accused of child sexual abuse.
[31] In 1979, he shut down the gender identity clinic at Johns Hopkins, saying that another researcher found that most of the people he tracked down who had undergone this type of surgery "were contented with what they had done and that only a few regretted it.
[3][36][37] According to Deborah Rudacille, McHugh is willing to concede that scientists may one day find a biological explanation for gender variance, saying "If people are afflicted in fetal life by an abnormal hormonal thing, they can have all kinds of peculiar sexual attitudes when they come out".
[38] In August 2016, McHugh, at the time retired, co-authored a 143-page article on gender and sexuality in The New Atlantis, a non-peer-reviewed journal published under the auspices of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Christian-focused conservative think tank.
In that article McHugh made the following assertion:[39][40] • The understanding of sexual orientation as an innate, biologically fixed property of human beings – the idea that people are "born that way" – is not supported by scientific evidence.• The hypothesis that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex – that a person might be "a man trapped in a woman's body" or "a woman trapped in a man's body" – is not supported by scientific evidence.In September 2016 Johns Hopkins University faculty members Chris Beyrer, Robert W. Blum, and Tonia C. Poteat wrote a Baltimore Sun op-ed, to which six other Johns Hopkins faculty members also contributed, in which they indicated concerns about McHugh's co-authored report, which they said mischaracterized the current state of science on gender and sexuality.
[5][41] More than 600 students, faculty members, interns, alumni and others at the medical school also signed a petition calling on the university and hospital to disavow the paper.
Hamer concludes that "when the data we have struggled so long and hard to collect is twisted and misinterpreted by people who call themselves scientists, and who receive the benefits and protection of a mainstream institution such as John Hopkins Medical School [sic], it disgusts me.
[6] According to a 2002 New York Times article, he is a Democrat "who describes himself as religiously orthodox, politically liberal and culturally conservative – a believer in marriage and the Marines, a supporter of institutions and family values".