While the British National Health Service has just announced a ban on prescribing puberty blockers to minors, French senators have published a report that expresses alarm at the excesses of child gender transition and have proposed a bill to put an end to it.
A lengthy investigation initiated by centre-right Les Républicains senator Jacqueline Eustache-Brinio has just been made public. It is alarmed by what has been described as “one of the greatest ethical scandals in the history of medicine”—namely sex reassignment in minors, made possible by the administration of puberty blockers and surgery.
The report, which is detailed and well-argued, points to a number of abuses by health professionals, indoctrinated by a “trans-affirmative” ideology and subject to the influence of experienced trans activist associations. The report’s authors accuse these associations of unreasonably encouraging gender transition in minors via an intense propaganda campaign on social media.
The scandal has been brewing for several months, thanks to the mobilisation of psychologists, psychiatrists, educators, and parents, who have denounced the ravages of this militant ideology among fragile and suffering young people, to whom gender transition is proposed as a miracle solution to the psychological problems they may be experiencing.
The Haute Autorité de Santé (HAS)—the French government body responsible for regulating health policies—is working on the issue, but the senators, believing that the danger is palpable, want to speed up the timetable, and announced that they would propose a bill before the summer to prohibit any medical gender transition before the age of 18 in France. The aim would be to prevent doctors, who currently have virtually complete discretion in this area, from administering puberty blockers and cross-reactive hormones, followed by sex reassignment surgery, to minors being treated for ‘gender dysphoria.’
Although statistics are lacking in France, the doctors consulted as part of the parliamentary inquiry report a dramatic increase in requests for gender reassignment, including among very young children. Professor David Cohen, head of the child psychiatry department at the prestigious Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, for example, said at his hearing that 16% of his patients who were minors were under the age of 12.
The psychologist Céline Masson and the child psychiatrist Caroline Eliacheff, both authors of the acclaimed essay La fabrique de l’enfant transgenre (“The making of the transgender child”), published in 2022, who were also asked to take part in the survey, emphasised that the overwhelming majority of children treated for ‘gender dysphoria’ are victims of other disorders: a quarter of the children seen at the Pitié-Salpêtrière for these reasons are school drop-outs, 42% have been victims of harassment, and 61% have experienced an episode of depression. One in five has attempted suicide. Sex reassignment is proposed as the solution to their problems, without any attempt to explore other ways of overcoming their profound malaise.
Their conclusions are in line with those of British experts called in during the Tavistock clinic scandal, which shook public opinion in the UK for its dramatic use of mass gender reassignment surgery on minors. The British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst David Bell observed that a third of the children passing through Tavistock suffered from autistic disorders, and many were victims of family violence. The other worrying phenomenon noted by the parliamentary report is the over-representation of girls, who account for 80% of requests for gender reassignment. The lack of balance in the phenomenon between girls and boys proves that there are other psychological and social problems that are insufficiently taken into account.
Transgender activists and certain health professionals are alarmed by the report, which they regard as retrograde and dangerous, and believe that there is nothing medical in the warnings, which would be purely “ideological.”
However, the absence of any real reflection on hormone therapies and reassignment surgery carried out on a massive scale on young patients should call for the utmost medical caution. International opinion against the excesses of transgender medical care is clearly moving in this direction.
