This has been archived https://archive.ph/MNjKv and have used google to translate.
There are parliamentary works which aim to create consensus, and those which rather seek to get their feet wet. The report on “the transidentification of minors” submitted to the Senate on March 21, of which Le Point was exclusively informed, is to be placed in the second category. Initiated in June 2023 by LR elected officials, the working group, led by Jacqueline Eustache-Brinio, senator from Val-d'Oise, after hearing 67 people, proposes to completely reverse the current trend, by making sex changes , not simpler, but impossible before the majority.
Very divisive, this subject remains surprisingly poorly documented. There is no reliable national data on transition requests among minors. However, consistent signs show that they have exploded in recent years, in France as in many developed countries. Hospital stays for “transsexualism” tripled between 2011 and 2020, going from 536 to 1,615. Four surgeons performed vaginoplasties (on adult patients) in 2002. There are thirty today and are overwhelmed by demands, write the senators.
Fashion effect or upheaval of morals? The report explores the question of causes, without setting itself the objective of deciding. Is the number of adolescents wishing to change their gender exploding because of fashion, or because society now accepts a reality that has been hidden for too long, as homosexuality was for so long?
Senator Jacqueline Eustache-Brinio makes no secret of it, she thinks that “fashion plays a big role” and must be fought. The divergence of views with the associations which encourage gender transitions heard by the senators (Trans Santé France, OUTrans, Trajectoires Jeunes Trans, etc.) seems insurmountable. Seen from their window, speech is freed, a leaden screed rises.
Everyone mentions the best interests of children and adolescents, but where are they located? The scientific literature does not provide an answer. As explained during his hearing in July 2023, Laurent Lantieri, head of the plastic surgery department at the Georges-Pompidou hospital in Paris, there is “no evidence of the effectiveness” of a sex change on the quality of life of patients and there will not be one for a long time, because “there is obviously no randomized trial” possible.
Fifteen proposals made
Ethically, it is inconceivable to form a group of operated people and a non-operated control group, both followed over years to measure the effectiveness of the transition in terms of well-being. Unless, of course, we consider the current wave of reassignment of adolescents as a form of life-size trial, at the participants' own risk...
If the activists of early transitions and the practitioners who follow them have underestimated the fashion effect and the risks involved, “the sexual transition of young people will be considered one of the greatest ethical scandals in the history of medicine », prophesies Jacqueline Eustache-Brinio at the conclusion of the report. “No one is considering prohibiting gender change in adulthood,” she explains to Le Point, but it is time, according to the LR group, to seriously curb the transition machine for those under 18. .
The rapporteurs make fifteen proposals. Some are symbolic, such as the return to administrative forms with only two boxes indicating sex or the abandonment of gender-neutral toilets. Much more important, the LR group wants to ban minors from so-called “sex reassignment” surgery and hormonal treatments, in particular puberty blockers. Puberty blockers, stop or else?
Ultra-confidential only fifteen years ago, these medications aim to delay puberty to give the patient time to choose their gender. They never stop making headlines. The National Health Service, the British health system, announced on March 12, 2024 that puberty blockers would no longer be prescribed to adolescents, outside of special cases linked to research. The decision had been in the works for months. Doctors overwhelmingly approve. The International Journal of Medicine (JIM, French-speaking) surveyed 1,034 healthcare professionals in August 2023. Among them, 84% were in favor of banning all hormonal treatments for transgender minors.
The British Ministry of Health welcomed this “historic decision”, reminding in passing that “care must be based on evidence”. An evidence ? Not for protransitional associations, which place feelings above all else. “Discovering one’s own transidentity is an intimate and personal experience. No one has the right to say for us whether we are trans or not,” Claire Vandendriessche, coordinator of the Trajectoires Jeunes Trans platform, explained to the senators. His association has extensively theorized what this intimate experience would be, described in texts rich in neologisms (“mégenrage”, “morinom”, etc.). Trajectoires Jeunes Trans considers that the will, including that of a minor, is enough to set in motion an entire chain of care going as far as surgery, including these famous puberty blockers.
An increasingly contested “Dutch protocol”
“We discovered while working on this report that their so-called safety was based on very fragile foundations,” explains Jacqueline Eustache-Brinio. The standard treatment for administering puberty blockers is based on the Dutch Protocol, developed in the Netherlands around twenty years ago. It postulates total reversibility without side effects of the treatment and possible administration from 12 years old (some practitioners go down to 8 years old). Problem is, the Dutch Protocol is based on the observation of only 54 patients. Not to mention the fact that it was partly financed by Ferring Pharmaceuticals, a laboratory which produces puberty blockers.
On September 26, 2023, senators heard from Dr. David Bell, British psychiatrist, former governor of the Tavistock and Portman medical center. As early as 2018, he sounded the alarm, noting worrying psychological disorders among adolescents taking puberty blockers. He had not been supported by the institution. The wheel spins. The gender identity development service for children and adolescents at the Tavistock clinic, the only center in England to provide blockers to minors, closed a year ago, weighed down by damning investigations.
All experts point to a gigantic discomfort among children who want to change sex. Among them, 70% present with anxiety-depressive disorders and 30% suffer from the after-effects of trauma, in particular sexual violence. More unexpectedly, 30% are autistic, often undiagnosed.
The senators plead for reinforced child psychiatric care for young people who do not feel in agreement with their birth sex. This speech bristles advocates of early transitions, who see, in mental disorders, proof of the urgency to act. Adolescents, and especially adolescent girls (seven out of ten candidates for transition are girls) would go through hell, in a prison body from which they would have to be freed.
The transition, difficult and potentially frustrating Illusion of the omnipotence of the will combined with the scalpel, warns Madeline Le Pollès, of the L’Être trans collective. At the antipodes of stories of transitions evoking the liberating molt of a caterpillar into a butterfly, his long testimony left an impression on the senators. Born a man, she began a transition at the age of 35.
She says she is terrified by those who maintain that “the child would be able to self-diagnose” and to knowingly request the surgery that she herself underwent. She does not regret her transition, but she insists on its exorbitant physical and moral cost, for an imperfect result. “I traded in a body that was certainly healthy but whose sexual anatomy I hated, for a body that more reflected my thoughts,” she says, “but I am now medicated and dependent for life on synthetic hormones […] The journey made me a trans-feminine being, a being in between,” sterile. Whatever Simone de Beauvoir thinks, for Madeline Le Pollès, one is born a woman, one does not become one.
“Adults can decide in conscience,” says Jacqueline Eustache-Brinio, “but children’s self-determination is no. » The report is not an end in itself. The LR group intends to prepare a bill incorporating its recommendations. After years on the defensive, faced with enthusiastic and determined transactivists, right-wing elected officials are convinced that they are moving in the direction of History. Spain allowed sex change from age 16 last year. It goes against the grain of the rest of Europe. Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the United Kingdom, “all the countries which had gone further than France in supporting the transition wishes of minors have gone into reverse. We are at a turning point,” concludes the senator.