Now the shameful conservative positions? The new star of the Republicans Bruno Retailleau, who barely made my own mystery of his ambitions for the presidential elections in 2027, was questioned this Sunday about BFMTV in a bill voted by the Senate in December 2021 to prohibit the “conversion therapies.”
At that time, the Interior Minister was the president of the senators LR. At the end of the debates marked by strong tensions between the right and the left, the Senate had ended up adopting this text that prohibits these practices, often organized behind closed doors, to modify sexual orientation or gender identity.
“I never refused conversion therapies”
Now they have been prohibited in France since the final adoption of this text in 2022 and are “assimilated to torture”, according to a report presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2020.
“I never refused to prohibit conversion therapies,” said Bruno Retailleau in our antenna on June 29.
Problem: Interior Minister voted against this bill presented by the Senatorial left, as indicated by the public choice that can be found in the Senate site.
Other 27 LR senators voted against this text, including two close to Bruno Retailleau, Senators Laurence Garnier, former secretary of state under Michel Barnier and Jacqueline Eustache-Brinio. They are now members of the new organization of the right party since last weekend.
The question of gender identity in the heart of the minister’s reluctance
The bill was discussed in the Senate in 2021, then its adoption in 2022, allowed to create a two -year prison punishing crime and 30,000 euros fine “the practices, behaviors or repeated comments aimed at modifying or repressing sexual orientation or gender identity, true or supposedly, of a person and having the effect of an alteration of their physical or mental health.”
This text still specifies that similar sentences are incurred for people who give “consultations” or prescribe “treatments by claiming to modify or repress sexual orientation or gender identity, true or supposed.”
These debates were considered by senatorial law as an opportunity to put transidentity on the table.
“It was a text in which we had an amendment that was important for me, an amendment that opposed what for minors, they are given in particular the puberty blockers,” said Bruno Retailleau in BFMTV.
Questions among minors
Senator LR Jacqueline Eustache-Brinio had deposited amendments to eliminate the concept of “gender identity” of the bill, without opposing the entire text.
“Are we forced to give in to all the currents, all the pressures and all the halls that impose social models? I do not believe it,” he launched in the gallery.
If the question of the medical process to change its gender did not appear at all in this bill, part of the senatorial law did not want to vote a text that showed the question of gender identity. Bruno Retailleau raises a related topic in the table: the question of transidentality among minors.
“It was simply a matter of saying” that young people could “use, in particular to transform, to the operations that their future can observe. We cannot (do that) when it is not yet mature,” said Bruno Retailleau in BFMTV.
“You have to reserve a time to reflect, you have to book the majority. And nothing more,” insisted the Interior Minister.
Adolescent and parents consent
There are currently no specific data to indicate in how many young people are worried, as explained by a report of the high health authority published in 2022.
This work also explains that there is no evidence that demonstrates that the desire to change its gender would be more common among adolescents than in the rest of the population while emphasizing “the increase in the frequency of adolescent consultations for treatment in recent years.”
The journey of minors transitions is based in particular on hormonal treatments that “more frequently are prescribed around 15 years”, you can still read there. “In this case, these are treatments whose impact is in an irreversible part” as in the voice. The consent of the adolescent and the two parents is always required.
As for genital reassignment surgery, from male sex to female sex, it cannot be practiced before the age of 18. However, there is the case of mastectomy, which corresponds to the elimination of the mammary gland, and that can be practiced very rare before most. Again, this operation cannot be done without the agreement of the parents and the adolescent.
Less than 10,000 interested people
It is estimated today that 8,952 people are followed by a doctor for their trans identity and benefit from the long -term condition (ALD, according to figures from the National Health Insurance Fund). Minors represent 3.3% of ALD holders. Almost 70% of the beneficiaries are between 18 and 35 years old.
In May 2024, the senators adopted a bill aimed at “supervising the medical practices implemented in the management of minors in gender questioning.” He was deposited by Jacqueline Eustache-Brinio, now vice president of the LR, and unanimously voted for the LR group, including Bruno Retailleau.
It seeks to prohibit minor health professionals, as part of the support, puberty blockers, as well as hormonal treatments that tend to develop the secondary sexual characteristics of the genre with which the minor is identified as the change of voice or hair.
It also prohibits the performance of surgical sexual reallocation operations in children under 18, as is the case with genital operations.
LGBT associations had lamented a text of “enormous violence”, denouncing a text that sought to “return trans identity in the field of mental illness.” Since the dissolution in the summer of 2024, this bill has stagnated.
Source: BFM TV
