Here are some thoughts on the article “ Trans minors: protests over care pathways cause concern », written by Mattea Battaglia and Solène Cordier in Le Monde, from Saturday March 30, 2024.
I am not a doctor, psychologist or psychoanalyst, I would like as a philosopher to share with you my thoughts about the article published in Le Monde, on Saturday March 30, a newspaper which has the particularity of continuing to believe itself to be a reference, even when it only gives the floor to one of the two parties in ongoing controversies.
The title of this article: “Trans minors: the challenge to care pathways is worrying”, is already in itself a masterpiece of the Jesuit genre.
First, how could a minor, whose personality is, and this is the case to say it adequately for once, in transition, be designated as "trans", that is to say as an individual who, to use the wooden language that transactivists warm up to, has not not felt in the right body, and decided to reject the sex that was assigned to him assigned at birth ? Will we say of a child who fills a coloring book that he is a painter? of another, who begins to scribble his first letters, that he is a writer? How can we believe that a minor could be "trans", unless we think, and this is precisely what must be critically questioned, that there would exist, in the manner of an absolute, a trans nature that would fall, as if from the sky, on the body of a few chosen ones?
Second semantic manipulation, just in the title of the Journal de la gauche sublime: "contestation". "Ah! How gallantly these things are put!" said a character from Molière. Because it is obviously not "contestation" that is involved, but, more seriously, more profoundly, opposition, refutation, challenge. Le Monde wants to believe that there are only debates and controversies - the other point of view being immediately rejected as conservative or reactionary - where there is an irreconcilable contradiction of points of view.
Third semantic manipulation, just in the title: "care pathway". As if, with the dependence (which will almost always be irreversible) on pharmaceutical products, as if with the mutilating surgical operations, which are also irreversible, it was, for minors what is more, a "care pathway"! It is true that for some time now sports medicine has accustomed us to this strange thing, that we can "treat" people who are not sick. To speak of a "care pathway" is at the same time to place on the side of the cruel, the heartless, even the fascists, all those who would oppose it, or even those who would express some doubts as to the merits of this care provided to young people whose malaise is exploited for reasons that are both ideological and economic.
The article in the most serious of our daily newspapers, which spans two pages, is a masterpiece of smooth and manipulative rhetoric. Is it our fault if the report presented by the Republican party, advocating the banning of hormonal treatments and puberty blockers for minors, was not presented by a left-wing party, which would have had the duty to do so? It is true that the left, or rather what is left of it, has ended up thinking that humanism was a weapon directed against the dominated and the minority. For a newspaper like Le Monde, as with a good part of our media, the simple fact that it is the LR party which raises in the public arena the question of the merits of the practices currently being carried out on minors suffering from “gender dysphoria” makes both the question, the debate and the fight illegitimate.
For the two authors of the article, "social contagion" is, like "health scandal" and "detransition" a "red rag". To speak of the impact and pressure of social networks, the world of media and that of entertainment on young people in pre-pubertal and pubertal crisis would, in fact, be to relativize this absolute that must remain their feeling : if a child or pre-adolescent feels that he or she belongs to a "gender" that does not correspond to his or her "sex assigned at birth", this does not come from physiological causes, psychological factors, or social conditions; it is a perfect unconditional that must be taken and treated as such. Thus we learn, in passing in the article, that the son of the president of the Grandir trans association, now aged 17, "came out" when, still a little girl, she was nine years old. Further on, we learn, not without dismay, that among the 240 young patients followed by the specialist centre at Pitié-Salpêtrière, some were only 3 years old... Luckily, the shrinks, those whipping fathers, have been pushed aside: pharmacy and surgery have free rein. Medication is a good substitute for speech: with it, we save on interpretation. Billiards is a good replacement for the sofa: for the time being, sessions are much shorter.
Mesdames Battaglia and Cordier, the authors of the article, who brush aside "social contagion" (they could have used the terms influence, impact, determination, cause, but "contagion" has the advantage of sounding morbid), should meditate on this maxim by François de La Rochefoucauld: "There are people who would never have been in love if they had never heard of love."
What is the value of the report written by reactionary senators against the experience of Maryse Rizza, the president of the Grandir trans association? lived of this mother must correspond to the feeling of her child: facts and their knowledge no longer have any place to exist, only affect prevails. Moreover, Mrs. Rizza sincerely thinks so: without puberty blockers and hormonal treatment, she would have lost her "child" (a psychoanalyst would not have failed to notice that she said neither her "son" nor her "daughter"). This argument for blackmailing suicide, which no statistics confirm, is used recurrently by transactivists: the alternative is: the transition path (pharmacy plus surgery) or death.
The violence of this "transition path", the expression of which evokes a pleasant itinerary, a salutary hike, a promising journey, must be erased from a neutral or positive term. Nothing must refer to the real destruction of an individuality by the combined power of neoliberal individualist ideology and capitalist techno-economy. Thus the term "pause" (repeated by the distressing president of the Grandir association) suggests the idea of a temporary and harmless stop to an ongoing process. When a DVD is paused, it can be resumed at any time, at the precise point where it was stopped. To speak of a pause in relation to puberty blockers is to act as if existence, life were translatable into mechanical terms, as if duration (see Bergson) could be identified with the time of the watch, the clock, the stopwatch! To speak of a "pause" in relation to a moment when the human body undergoes its most radical transformation, that of puberty, is to compare it to a machine, to deny in it what is alive, that is to say, unique, random, fanciful, creative, and also tragic.
Another term signals all the infamy of this morbid ideology that is transactivism and that, naturally, the authors of the article take up: that of "torsoplasty", a euphemism for mastectomy, the removal of breasts, whose unbearable images should be, for the information of the public, widely disseminated so that it can finally realize what a "transition path" can mean for some. A clever find, this "torsoplasty" which suggests the art of sculpture, modeling, the creation of new forms, and which, consequently, erases the terribly real mutilation, the unbearable destruction of a beautiful female body sacrificed on the altar of an all-powerful techno-economy and fantasy. In the early centuries of Christianity, Saint Agatha had her breasts torn off with pliers; she was a martyr, victim of executioners in the service of a power that could not accept her faith. Today, a growing number of young girls themselves "ask" their executioners to "deliver" them from their hated femininity. There is another difference: young girls who undergo a mastectomy, a mutilation whose name is concealed by torsoplasty, will not have the grace of meeting a Saint Peter capable of erasing their wounds.
For a long time we could believe that the main task of a democratic society was to fight for freedom and against injustice. We now know that there is something more serious than the threat to freedom and to our ideal of equality: the risk of barbarism under the cover of new technologies and new ideologies.