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@ PG
2025-02-24 12:00:54
L’Observatoire La Petite Sirene has long questioned gender dysphoria as a diagnosis, proposing an alternative framework for making sense of young people’s struggles: pubertal sexuation anxiety. “Anxiety is something we can hear in all these young people,” Masson remarked. “It’s an anxiety when faced with pubertal maturation or sexual development.” Caroline Eliacheff observed that “collectively, we refused to have this concept of ‘gender dysphoria’ imposed on us.”
Jean-François Solal tied the experience of pubertal sexuation anxiety to “the very nature of adolescence,” since “anxiety is associated with desire, and this is indeed what is at stake in adolescence”.
“If we say that anxiety is universal, it is not a disease, not a pathology. Rather it is just a marker of puberty. Anxiety means you are getting close to the desire, which is enigmatic, ambivalent, which has to do with love and hate… The bodily changes of puberty, the effects of new sexual impulses, are at first seen as alien, as something that attacks you before it can be tamed and integrated. Pubertal sexuation anxiety forces a child to rework their relationship to others. In some cases, the adolescent cannot integrate these new impulses and, in that case, they are very happy when adults come to them with something that is ready to use—a medical solution! You were born in the wrong body and we, as adults, will remedy that.”
David Bell has long warned about the dangers of labeling young patients as “transgender” and reiterated these concerns at the conference: “We shouldn’t use the term ‘transgender’ when it comes to young people. By doing so you’re behaving as though you know what you’re talking about, as though there is such a diagnosis. But it’s not a diagnosis, it’s a symptom, and if it’s a symptom we need to know what lies behind it.” Can the child still grow up? by Eliza Mondegreen
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