TRIBUNE. The recommendations of the French National Authority for Health (HAS), which calls for gender transitions to be free of charge from the age of 16, are in line with the theses put forward for several decades by the most radical activist movements, denounces Olivier Vial, director of the CERU and author of the report ‘Détrans, les Cassandre de la communauté trans’ (‘Detrans, the Cassandras of the trans community’).
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Olivier Vial - 14 décembre 2024 - Le JDD
‘You can't be serious when you're 17...’. And yet, if we follow the recommendations of the French National Authority for Health (HAS), we could, from the age of 16, decide to embark on a long journey of gender transition, ranging from changing our social identity to taking heavy hormone treatments, via surgical operations with irreversible consequences.
This opinion, drawn up by an anonymous committee whose administrative authority refuses to reveal the names and qualifications of its members despite a legal appeal, is in line with the theses put forward by the most radical activist movements over the last few decades. For them, feelings are now the only truth that should be taken into account. Biology and anatomy are written off. If a person has doubts about their sexual identity, if at a given moment they feel the need to transition to another gender, nothing should be allowed to slow down the realisation of their feelings. Calls for reflection or caution are immediately perceived as violence.
For example, the HAS urges doctors who receive people wishing to make the transition to confine themselves to recording their wishes without attempting to offer any medical assessment or support: ‘Gender identity should not be the subject of a specific psychiatric assessment’. For the authors of this report, everything must be done to simplify and speed up gender transitions. They want to create a free, fast-track public service offering easier access to hormone treatments (puberty blockers, ‘gender-affirming hormones’) and surgical operations (mastectomy, vaginoplasty, phalloplasty, etc.).
The spiral of early transitions
Questioning the medium-term validity of such a process is condemned by transactivist associations, who see any call for reflection as a sign of transphobia. In an outrageous move, the HAS envisages parents being stripped of their parental authority if they refuse their minor child's request. ‘If the parents persist in refusing their child's application’, in fact, in such a case the HAS recommends “a report that could go as far as a partial delegation of parental authority” or even “forfeiture of parental authority or emancipation”.
This rush to action is incomprehensible and harmful because, as numerous medical studies have shown, gender dysphoria in children and adolescents can be a transitory condition. ‘Longitudinal studies of prepubertal children (mainly boys) referred to specialised services for assessment of gender dysphoria show that it persists into adulthood in only 6-23% of subjects’. For many people who identify themselves as gender dysphoric at an early age, we find that over time they simply had difficulty understanding their emerging sexual orientation and that over time they simply define themselves as homosexual and no longer as transgender.
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