Photo of Delia Giandeini on Unsplash
Published on March 18, 2024
by Paul Sugy , Stéphane Kovacs and Agnès Leclair
Read the article in full: Le Figaro – Transidentité des mineurs: le rapport des sénateurs LR qui sonne l’alarme
Elected representatives have drawn up an alarming report on medical care for young people questioning their gender.
Transidentity in minors is at the heart of a “tense scientific and medical debate”: this is the euphemism with which the LR senators preface their report on the thorny issue of sex reassignment in children. And their conclusions are unlikely to ease the controversy. The result of almost a year’s work, this thick document published by Jacqueline Eustache-Brinio, Senator for Val-d’Oise, is intended to show the pervasiveness of a “trans-affirmative” ideology among health professionals working with adolescents who are uncomfortable with puberty and the affirmation of their sexual identity. The authors then accuse transactivist associations, backed by influential publications on social networks, of speeding up these children’s journey towards gender transition.
In more than 80% of cases, children wishing to make a gender transition are young girls.
In the wake of the report, the Senate Right announced that it would be tabling a bill before the summer to ban all medical transitions in France before the age of 18. Without waiting for the recommendations currently being drafted by the French National Authority for Health (HAS), the text aims to prevent the prescription or administration of puberty blockers and cross-reactive hormones, as well as sexual reassignment surgery, to minors being treated for gender dysphoria. The current framework leaves more autonomy to doctors.
The LR senators estimate that the number of children identifying themselves as trans has exploded in ten years. In the absence of official statistics in France, the authors infer this dynamic from British, Swedish and American studies: in the United States, the number of diagnoses has tripled in five years, and now affects more than 40,000 children under the age of 17. Professor David Cohen, head of the child psychiatry department at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, told his audience that he receives around forty new requests for consultation every year. There are at least ten similar specialist units in hospitals. 16% of his minor patients are under the age of 12.
Assisted by psychologist Céline Masson and child psychiatrist Caroline Eliacheff, who are campaigning for an alternative approach to gender disorders in children, the senators point out that most of the minors who consult the specialist units are ultimately diagnosed with gender dysphoria, even though their malaise is more general and calls for broader support: in layman’s terms, health professionals refer to “co-morbidities”. A quarter of the children seen at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital for these reasons are school drop-outs, 42% have been victims of bullying and 61% have experienced a depressive episode. One in five has even attempted suicide. Their care is also suffering from the impoverished state of French child psychiatry, the senators denounce.
Over-representation of girls
In fact, we find that the majority of children who have taken puberty blockers have gone on to undergo gender reassignment.
During his hearing, the British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst David Bell, author of a critical report in 2018 on the care of trans children in the British healthcare system, added that a third of the children who passed through his clinic in Tavistock even suffered from autistic disorders. However, in his view, the clinic’s “main objective” was “not to treat the psychological malaise of these young people, but to take them out of their bodies”. This haste, he says, overlooked a number of other factors that should have been of greater interest to the medical profession: violence within the family, and often difficulty in accepting or expressing homosexuality.
In more than 80% of cases, children wishing to make a gender transition are young girls: in France, in varying proportions, this over-representation of girls is also found among the patients of the health professionals interviewed. Catherine Zittoun, a child psychiatrist in Paris, observes that “persistent difficulties in being perceived as ‘tomboys’ are turning into a need for hasty assignment”.
“In fact, we find that the majority of children who have taken puberty blockers have gone on to undergo gender reassignment. Do these blockers allow the situation to be put on hold for a few years or do they encourage the start of a gender reassignment process? That’s the central question we’re asking today”, sums up Parisian child psychiatrist Jean Chambry, head of department at the Centre Intersectoriel d’Accueil pour Adolescents (Ciapa). “The difficulty is that we don’t have the benefit of hindsight”, he admits.
Read the article in full: Le Figaro – Transidentité des mineurs: le rapport des sénateurs LR qui sonne l’alarme
