“It’s an epidemic of suicides,” says Simon Jutant, a lawyer for the Acceptess-T association, which specializes in transgender people, in an official statement. The debate about possible regret related to the gender transition was reinforced in France after a 15 year old trans boy committed suicide in early May, inside the school. , in the city of Le Mans.
According to a study published by The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, the risk of mortality in transgender people is twice that of cisgender people (those who identify with birth sex). Among transgender women, the leading cause of death revealed worldwide is cardiovascular disease. Among trans men, suicide ranks first. One of the authors, Martin den Heijer, however, stressed that further research will be needed to assess the impact in the coming years.
Alert to physicians
In February, the French Academy of Medicine warned of “the growing number of young transgender adults wanting to reverse treatments and surgeries”. To control the problem, the institution asked doctors to be cautious with children and adolescents: “especially from the psychological point of view of this population and the many undesirable effects, even serious complications, that some of the available therapies can cause”.
The country’s Ministry of Health announced in a statement this month that the agendas for consultations specializing in transgender people are full. the gender transition as a solution. The factors cited were school dropout, suicidal behavior, psychological problems and/or problems related to the autistic spectrum.
In France, hormone treatments are allowed, provided they are approved by the parents, regardless of the patient’s age. Masectomy, removal of the breasts, can be performed from 14 years old. Surgeries involving the genitals are self- The number of trans adults increased times in
years
According to the French National Health Insurance Fund (Cnam), the number of adults who went through the gender transition was multiplied by 10 in the last years. In 2020, 9,000 French people became transgender and 70% of them went through the transition between the 18 and the 35 years.
In a special article in the French newspaper Le Figaro, Agnès Leclair tells the story of a person who was born woman, went through the transition and, after 7 years of hormonal treatments and surgeries, is looking for a reversal to regain her natural feminine traits.
Some changes, however, are irreversible. With less than 21 years old, Mila (as she was called in the report) had the surgery to remove the uterus, the hysterectomy. “Today I am mutilated. It was such a loss to realize that the doctors let me sterilize myself at 21 years old and that I ruined my body. Fortunately, I escaped the onset of baldness. I realized that my face and skin were not so damaged”, reveals the patient to the journalist of the French newspaper.
The pandemic reinforced the trend among the younger ones
With the pandemic, younger people began to seek information and declare themselves transgender. Blandine, a French teacher known on social media, created a podcast to talk about the subject. According to her, who is a feminist activist, teenage girls are the ones who suffer the most, especially those who don’t fit female beauty standards.
“Isolated from real life, girls convinced themselves online, in a few weeks, that they were boys. Teenage girls told me that are constantly connected to forums in the trans community that play with victimization. They felt they were coming together on the side of the good, the downtrodden, and were applauded when they came out as non-binary,” declares Blandine in the broadcast of Rebelles du genre ).
According to her, there is still a small record of transgender people who have regretted the transition (from 1 to 2% in the country), because it is “after many years that people account that they were wrong”. “The wave is yet to come,” she warns her.
