“So we’re going to be asked to cover our children until they’re 18”? Since learning about the political project being supported by a fringe group of the Les Républicains (LR, right) party, Maryse Rizza, the mother of a transgender teenager, has been equally angry and worried. Le Figaro and Le Point, which leaked a statement from European lawmakers on transgender adolescents on March 18, urges a ban on hormone therapy and puberty blockers, which can be prescribed to treat gender dysphoria (the suffering caused by the mismatch between a person’s sex as assigned at birth and their gender identity).
Senator Jacqueline Eustache-Brinio, who took up the issue together with some 15 different senators from her proper-aircraft group, Les Républicains, plans to introduce a bill on the subject before the summer. “Now, it is done very quickly, young persons are steered towards a move too quickly. Rather, they need to be accompanied regarding their discomfort and encouraged to seek medical care,” she said, calling focus to a “growing happening in the media and in open life,” while “all” international countries, she claimed, are backing away from prescribing these treatments. The senator acknowledged that she had authorized the Observatoire de la Petite Sirène (“Little Mermaid Observatory”), a non-profit organization that is notoriously opposed to all gender transitions by minors, to oversee this parliamentary project.
Throughout the report’s 369 pages, the authors frequently wield alarming phrases like “health scandal,” “cultural contagion,” and unpleasant “detransitions” – but it cannot be reduced to merely that. Additionally, the report takes into account the viewpoints of a large number of participants and authorities, both domestically and internationally. And it raises important inquiries: How many kids have gender dysphoria and how many of them are affected? How many have regretted their move? How catastrophic are the solutions? However, the advice in the report is far beyond the lived accounts of those most directly affected.
Comprehensive care
Rizza, who is also the president of the association Grandir Trans (“Growing up Trans”), which includes 1,300 families, is one of the 67 people who were questioned by the senators during hearings. “It’s panic,” she said. “If we’re heading towards a bill that bans filters, what are we going to do”? Her brother, now 17, came up when he was 9: “He told me he was imprisoned in his body,” a woman’s body, she recalled. When the transidentity is called, there is an tremendous amount of suffering that comes out. At the time, he may simply say ‘I want to be a child, I’m a son'”.
