By Christian Godin, philosopher. Author of La crise de la réalité. Formes et mécanismes d'une destitution, Champ Vallon, 2020, La Société schizophrène, Pocket Agora, 2021.
I am not a doctor, psychologist, or psychoanalyst, but as a philosopher, I would like to share my reflections on the article published in Le Monde on Saturday, March 30. This newspaper has the peculiarity of continuing to believe itself to be a reference, even when it only gives a platform to one side in ongoing controversies.
The title of the article, "Trans Minors: The Contestation of Treatment Paths Causes Concern," is itself a masterpiece of Jesuit-style rhetoric.
First, how could a minor, whose personality is, and this is an appropriate term for once, "in transition," be labeled as "trans," that is, as an individual who, to use the wooden language employed by trans activists, doesn’t feel they are in the "right body" and has decided to reject the sex assigned to them at birth? Would we call a child filling in a coloring book a painter? Or one who scribbles their first letters a writer? How can we believe a minor could be "trans," unless we are willing to accept, and this is precisely what needs critical examination, that there exists, like an absolute truth, a "trans nature" that descends as if from the heavens onto the bodies of a chosen few?
Second semantic manipulation, right in the title of Le Monde's sublime left-leaning publication: “contestation.” "Ah! How gallantly these things are phrased," as a character in Molière once said. For it is not merely "contestation" at play here but, more seriously, more deeply, opposition, refutation, repudiation. Le Monde wants to believe there are only debates and controversies—where dissenting views are immediately labeled as conservative or reactionary—when in fact there are irreconcilable contradictions in the points of view.
The third semantic manipulation in the title alone: "treatment paths." As if, with the dependence (which will almost always be irreversible) on pharmaceutical products and the irreversible mutilating surgeries, it could be called a "treatment path" for minors, no less! It is true that for some time now, sports medicine had already accustomed us to this strange notion, that one could "treat" people who are not sick. Speaking of "treatment paths" at the same time places those who oppose them on the side of the cruel, the heartless, even the fascists, as if to suggest that those who harbor doubts about these treatments for youth whose distress is being exploited for ideological and economic reasons are without empathy.
The article in our nation’s "most serious" daily, which spans two pages, is a masterclass in sugary and manipulative rhetoric. Is it our fault if the report presented by the Les Républicains (LR) party, advocating for the ban on hormonal treatments and puberty blockers for minors, was not presented by a left-wing party, though it should have been their duty? The truth is that the left, or rather what remains of it, has come to think that humanism is a weapon against the oppressed and minorities. For a newspaper like Le Monde, and indeed much of our media, the mere fact that the LR party raises the question of the legitimacy of the practices imposed on minors suffering from "gender dysphoria" makes both the question, the debate, and the struggle itself illegitimate.
For the two authors of the article, the terms "social contagion," much like "health scandal" or "detransition," are just "red flags." To speak of the impact and pressure of social media, the entertainment industry, and the media on young people in prepubescent and pubescent crisis would, in fact, relativize the absolute nature that their feelings must remain: if a child or pre-adolescent feels they belong to a "gender" that doesn’t align with their "assigned sex at birth," it supposedly has nothing to do with physiological causes, psychological factors, or social conditions—it's an unconditional certainty that must be accepted and treated as such. Thus, we learn in passing from the article that the son of the president of the association Grandir Trans, now 17 years old, made his "coming out" when, as a little girl, she was just nine years old. Later, we are told, with no small amount of astonishment, that among the 240 young patients being treated by the specialized center at La Pitié-Salpêtrière, some were as young as three… Fortunately, the psychotherapists—those harsh disciplinarians—have been pushed aside: pharmaceuticals and surgery have free rein. Medication conveniently replaces conversation: it eliminates the need for interpretation. Surgery takes the place of therapy; after all, it’s much quicker.
Ms. Battaglia and Ms. Cordier, the authors of the article, dismiss with a wave of the hand the idea of "social contagion" (they could have used terms like influence, impact, determination, or cause, but "contagion" has the advantage of sounding morbid). They should meditate on this maxim from François de La Rochefoucauld: "There are people who would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love."
What worth could a report drafted by reactionary senators have when compared to the lived experience of Maryse Rizza, the president of Grandir Trans? The experience of this mother must align with her child’s feelings: facts and knowledge no longer matter—only feelings do. Moreover, Ms. Rizza sincerely believes it: without puberty blockers and hormone therapy, she would have lost her "child" (a psychoanalyst wouldn’t have missed the fact that she didn’t say either her "son" or her "daughter"). This argument of suicide blackmail, which no statistics corroborate, is repeatedly used by trans activists: the choice, they say, is either the path of transition (pharmaceuticals and surgery) or death.
The violence of this "transition path," whose expression evokes an agreeable journey, a beneficial hike, a promising adventure, must be erased with a neutral or positive term. Nothing should point to the real destruction of an individual through the combined power of neoliberal individualist ideology and capitalist techno-economy. Thus, the term "pause" (used by the woeful president of Grandir) suggests the idea of a harmless temporary stop. When a DVD is paused, it can be resumed at any moment, from the exact point where it was stopped. Referring to puberty blockers as a "pause" suggests life can be treated like a mechanical process, as if human existence could be timed like a clock! To call it a "pause" during the time when the human body undergoes its most radical transformation—puberty—is to liken it to a machine and deny its living, unique, unpredictable, creative, and even tragic nature.
Another term reveals the infamy of this morbid ideology that is transactivism, which the article’s authors have fully embraced: "torsoplasty," a euphemism for mastectomy, the removal of breasts, whose unbearable images should be widely shared with the public to inform them of the grim reality behind the phrase "transition path." The cunning invention of the term "torsoplasty" evokes the art of sculpture, of shaping and molding new forms, which in turn obscures the harsh reality of mutilation, the unbearable destruction of a beautiful female body sacrificed on the altar of omnipotent technocracy and fantasy. In the early centuries of Christianity, Saint Agatha had her breasts torn off with pliers; she was a martyr, a victim of executioners serving a regime that could not accept her faith. Today, a growing number of young girls "ask" their own executioners to "free" them from their hated femininity. There is one more difference: the young girls who undergo mastectomy, a mutilation concealed by the term "torsoplasty," will not be granted the grace of meeting a Saint Peter capable of erasing their wounds.
For a long time, we believed the primary task of a democratic society was to fight for freedom and against injustice. We now know there is something even more grave than the threat to freedom and our ideal of equality: the risk of barbarism, disguised under the cloak of new technologies and ideologies.
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