” A shock “, “a tsunami”, “a before and an after”… The vocabulary used by parents of transgender children whom The world encountered is unequivocal. When they hear the news, it’s amazement. Jeanne (she wants only her first name and that of her child to appear), met with her son Charlie at the specialized consultation of the child psychiatrist Agnès Condat, at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, lived it.
His son, now a 16-year-old Parisian high school student, found himself, four years ago, sent by the emergency room to the office of the doctor, who has been receiving minors there since 2013. “questioning their gender identity” and their families. At the time, Charlie was experiencing very strong “gender dysphoria”, a feeling of mismatch between his birth sex (female) and the one he identifies with (male). A painful period, marked by suicidal desires, which Jeanne modestly summarizes: “Since entering 6e, it was not working at all. »
According to the scientific literature, between 0.1% and 2% of the population is affected by transidentity, the fact of not recognizing oneself, or partially, in the sex assigned at birth. Very often, adolescence and the appearance of secondary sexual characteristics are a turning point, potentially generating suffering for transgender people.
For Charlie, it was time to tell the family. A note left on the kitchen table, for his parents, shortly before his 12th birthday. “He wrote to us that he was a boy. » Jeanne remembers, moved: “I went to see him in his room, he was upset, he was crying in his bed. The urgency for me was to reassure him. » Transidentity? She had never thought of it, questioning her sexual orientation. “I could see that my child was sensitive to LGBT issues, I had broached the subject with him, asking him if he preferred girls or boys. »
Abysses of guilt and anguish
Anne Marbot (a pseudonym, chosen to tell her story in the exciting comic strip Transitions by Elodie Durand, published in April 2021 by Delcourt editions) had also asked the question to her 19-year-old daughter, whose recent change of look (hair cut very short) and clothing (wide clothes, hiding her feminine forms ) aroused a question. “I thought something serious had happened to him. I questioned him in a very awkward way: why are you disguising yourself as a boy? He replied: I don’t disguise myself” – in her story, she only refers to “gender” in the masculine.
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