“So we are going to be asked to hide our children until they turn 18? » Maryse Rizza, mother of a transgender teenager, has been as angry as she has been worried since she learned of the project carried out by a section of the Les Républicains (LR) party. In a Senate report devoted to transgender minors, revealed in Le Figaro And Point on March 18, a ban on hormonal treatments and puberty blockers was advocated, which can be prescribed to combat gender dysphoria (the suffering linked to the mismatch between one’s birth sex and one’s perceived gender).
The senator from Val-d’Oise, Jacqueline Eustache-Brinio, who has taken up the subject with around fifteen other senators from her group, plans to table a bill in this sense before the summer. “Today we are moving too quickly, we are directing young people too quickly towards a transition, we must instead support them with their discomfort and encourage psychiatric care”she argues, pointing to a “a growing phenomenon in the media and in public life”while ” all “ foreign countries, she says, are moving backwards in prescribing these treatments. The senator assumes having placed this parliamentary work under the aegis of the Little Mermaid Observatory, notoriously opposed to any gender transition among minors.
“Health scandal”, “social contagion”, “detransitions” painful… These “red rags” recur throughout the 369 pages of the report, without it being able to be reduced to this: it gives voice to a multiplicity of actors and experts, in France and internationally. And implicitly asks questions that deserve an in-depth answer: how many children are affected by gender dysphoria? How many, after their transition, regret it? How irreversible are the treatments? But the recommendations of this report are a thousand miles from the experience witnessed by those first concerned.
Multidisciplinary care
Maryse Rizza, who is also president of the Grandir trans association, bringing together 1,300 families, is among the 67 people interviewed by the senators. ” It’s the panic, she says. If we move towards a bill that bans blockers, what will we do? » Her son, now 17, came out at age 9: “He told me he was in prison in his bodya girl’s body, she remembers. There is enormous suffering that comes out when transidentity is named. At the time, he just said “I want to be a boy, I am a boy”. »
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