Laurent Dupont: Dear Céline Masson, you warned in 2018 in Marianne about “identity drifts” at the University. What you then called "identification with the dominated" is not unrelated to the theme of our interview today. But if we wanted to talk with you, it's because you initiated the very recent Observatory of ideological discourses on children and adolescents, which designed and distributed an Appeal concerning the impact of medical practices on children diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

Immediately after the broadcast of the documentary Petite fille, colleagues had expressed their concerns about it in Lacan Quotidien. But those were just individual reactions. Your Appeal testified to a collective reflection, and took a clear position on the clinical level. As a result, it had a reawakening effect in the Freudian field. I can't resist the pleasure of quoting Jacques-Alain Miller's letter to Angelina Harari, the current president of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, which she wanted to pass on last night to the directors of the seven Schools of the AMP "However, the recent distribution by the Observatory of a text presented as an Appeal clearly shows that outside the Freudian field, we were much more advanced than us, both in collective elaboration and in political decision making. This, regardless of the merit of the comments and objections that many of us immediately raised about the text. »

On the pediment of Lacan Quotidien floats this word of Lacan: “The master of tomorrow, it is from today that he commands. It seems to me that in the media, the universities, with young people in general, we are dealing with a discourse which tends to become the new discourse of the master.

Since the broadcast of your Call in Lacan Quotidien, no less than ten issues have come out about it. That is to say if this Call resounded among us. We received texts from Argentina, Spain, Italy, of course from France. Thank you for your warning shot. And thanks also to Patrick Landman for being the relay on his precious mailing list. I would first like to know how you came up with the idea of this Observatory.

 

Where does the new Observatory come from and where is it going?

 

Celine Masson : The warning signal is the documentary Little Girl. This is what gave rise to a collective writing that I initiated with a column in Marianne (1), co-signed with Jean-Pierre Lebrun and Caroline Eliacheff in particular, while Télérama was talking about a wonderful film, a luminous ode. Psychoanalysts have been challenged by this way of depicting the child and by the way his speech is treated.

Having worked for a long time on ideological discourse, it seemed to me that it was almost a propaganda film where the child would serve as a standard for militant causes. We manufacture a symptom, “gender dysphoria”, labeled by the DSM and which seems to fascinate a certain number of psychiatrists. This film Little Girl is not an epiphenomenon, it shows quite remarkably the way in which the word of the child is confiscated by the adult, who claims that he knows what is good for him because the child asks for it. . A film is above all a montage, and this montage is exceptional in the sense that it comes to give a dazzling image of our society, and the way in which it produces “transgender” children.

It is this striking staging that grabbed us, we then formed a collective around a text that made a platform and in the same movement, created the Observatory. We received many messages following the publication of this forum in Marianne, not only from psychoanalysts, but from parents, teachers, journalists of course, doctors too, school doctors.

​

LD: You called it: “Observatory of ideological discourses...” It goes beyond the trans issue.

 

CM : My idea, indeed, is that we are part of a climate where ultimately the debates are preempted by a certain militancy which tends to censor anyone who does not meet certain criteria established by a handful of people active on the networks . The result is what is called the cancel culture, translated as "culture of cancellation", I would rather say "culture of indignation". A victim culture. We are indignant, we revolt in the face of injustice. It is necessary to fight discrimination and injustice. We can revolt and it is surely beneficial, but this culture of indignation emanates directly from “political correctness”, or political woke. Woke means being on the alert, especially in the face of discrimination and racism. This politically woke is found at all levels of society, on social networks, in the world of culture, cinema, literature. We have examples of this almost daily: unbolted statues, canceled conferences, etc. No more critical debate is therefore possible, a single thought then triumphs without any resistance. Freedoms are curtailed in the name of certain beliefs. It is this climate that we find at the university, for example at the University of Lille, a squad of activists accompanied by teachers had tried to force students to give up their project deemed not politically correct, Sylviane Agacinski had to renounce under threat, his conference on surrogacy in the era of its technical reproducibility.

It is from this place, the university, that I was able to observe a contagion of certain discourses that are also found in certain clinical places.

We must not generalize, it is not the whole University which is gangrenous, but it is true that we find a militant entryism of oppressive minorities which exert constraints on public opinion, which very often is not aware that it is subject to new standards. Ideas are spreading insidiously at all levels of our society, including in the clinical field, there too we should create a woke, an awakening, an awareness among our colleagues, while these rather furiously committed minorities are putting pressure on a majority. Freud in The Future of an Illusion spoke of minorities having understood how to appropriate the means of power and coercion.

The University after all is a sounding board for what is happening in society. Fortunately, we see here and there voices rising in order to publicly refuse these reductive and divisive assignments: to be reduced to the color of one's skin, one's sex; feminists point out that biological sex, not just chosen gender identity, matters for the defense of rights. Our voice counts among these voices, we associate ourselves with it.

It is as a researcher and psychoanalyst committed to a certain intelligibility that I reacted to what is happening among so-called transgender children, whose speech seems to be carried above all by a certain militant nebula in the wake of the woke.

The Observatory is a collective that is interested in these issues, ideological discourses, and their impact on clinical and medical practices. We are observers of the "signs of the times", to use the beautiful title of Marc Weitzmann's program on France Culture. We are mostly psychoanalysts, psychiatrists for some teacher-researchers, secondary school teachers like Delphine Girard, founder of Vigilance Collèges et Lycées. Somatic doctors have joined us, in particular endocrinologists (Nicole Athéa very involved with trans people whom she has helped a lot), pediatricians and even surgeons (Anne-Laure Boch, neurosurgeon, signed the first forum with us, as well as the appeal , very critical of the hypertechnicity of a soulless medicine). The philosopher Jean-François Braunstein and the sociologist Smaïn Laacher are attentive to our work in which they participate. Lawyers and magistrates support the observatory. Several hundred colleagues have signed the appeal which circulates in the psychoanalytic milieu, including many psychoanalysts. Some have actively associated themselves in order to think together what is at stake for these young people, clinically, socially and politically.

The Ministry of National Education has read the text of the appeal and supports it.

The Observatory is called upon by associations of parents concerned about the medical responses given to them, particularly in Canada but also in England and Switzerland. Children's lawyers have spread our appeal in several countries.

​

LD: There is also a whistleblower side.

 

CM : That's the word. This is the meaning of the Call. The Call is a text that alerts by a non-controversial but critical argumentation, it is addressed in particular to the psychiatric and psychoanalytical environment, to doctors. Many colleagues very quickly got involved, each in their own way, from several associations: the SPP, by Jacqueline Schaeffer; the APF, by Claire Squires, who is a lecturer and psychiatrist; the SPF at Patrick Guyomard; Jean Pierre Lebrun and Pascale Belot Fourcade, from ALI; At Analytical Space, Laurence Croix, who participates in our work, spoke for it; and you, of course at the ECF. You are the ones who mobilized the most, we are delighted. It is very important for the moment to issue this alert to our psychoanalyst colleagues.

 

From “Little Girl” to Tavistock

 

LD: The Appeal is centered on the child and the trans issue. The documentary Little Girl presents a child who would be the prince of his word, sole master in his kingdom, erasing all traces of the unconscious.

 

Anna Cognet : A mobilization was organized from a state of shock - the word is a bit strong - in the face of the documentary. Several colleagues were scandalized spontaneously, but afterwards, it was necessary to produce the interpretation of this state, and that we manage to write something about it. We wanted to be careful, and distinguish what was due to this little boy, to his suffering, and, on the other hand, to make our argument a little solid. We did a lot of research, we interviewed actors in the LGBT movement, we looked abroad, in Canada, in Sweden. What emerged from the countries that have long implemented these transformative programs for children is that they have a whole body of challenges to these practices. In France, we often say that we are a little behind in terms of tolerance towards minorities, towards this type of struggle. In the end, we are above all behind in terms of the perception of the risk of abuse.

In the countries most open to this type of modification, to the rights of minorities – the United States, Canada, Nordic countries like Sweden, which were pioneers – there is the beginning of a reversal. The first consequences of these situations have been felt, and some are dramatic. We see the emergence of associations and the production of documentaries denouncing the harmfulness of these practices. In the end, we are not alone in asking ourselves questions. In France perhaps, but in other countries a reflection has begun.

​

LD: Are you referring in particular to the Swedish documentary Trans Train?

​

AC : Yes, but also to a very active Canadian association. And the more we dig, the more we discover that many are wondering. For example, in Great Britain, it has become a major topic that the BBC has highlighted with topics on "detransitioners".

Read the judgment against the Tavistock Clinic in the Keyra Bell case. It is absolutely thrilling. The judge put a lot of effort into demonstrating that the studies that had been carried out by the Clinic proved nothing, and that there was ignorance of the consequences on bodies and lives. Tavistock had not done the work that would have been necessary to justify interventions on minors.

We have read and listed all the arguments that already existed. Minors should not be allowed to take such drastic decisions against their bodies. Anything that is supposedly medically safe is actually not. So we work in a multidisciplinary way: ethical, philosophical, psychoanalytical obviously, because it is our field of thought, but also medical and legal.

​

LD: It seems to me that on the trans side, there is an unthought of consent. As if the lock didn't work. Am I wrong in saying that?

​

AC : I completely agree, and I think you express it well. It is clear that, for most trans activists, there is something that cannot be said. All the clinicians who have left Tavistock in recent years say the same thing. They don't want to come across as blaming their colleagues, but some go so far as to speak of collective brainwashing. There is a permanent discourse at Tavistock to maintain that we are doing good there, that we are at the forefront, and that there are enemies outside who wish us harm. As soon as someone leaves this logic, it means that he has gone over to the side of the enemy.

​

LD: I think back to what Céline Masson said in the introduction. We see this effect on social networks as amplifiers. It is certainly not a reflection of society, but the split produced by the unthought of the unconscious gives rise to antagonistic discourses, forehead against forehead, which do not help us to move forward serenely. On the imaginary axis, in the mirror, the other is necessarily the other to be shot down. Anne Perret, you have personal experience, you know this subject well.

 

Anne Perret's experience

​

Anne Perret : Yes indeed, since I have just been excluded in a way, I would say, rather abruptly from a specialized consultation for “transgender” children and adolescents from a CMPP, for having supported and signed the Appeal of the Observatory. However, I can talk about my place as a clinician. This consultation opened in September 2020. I met nine teenagers, with whom I started regular work. I have been working in adolescent psychiatry for more than 20 years. When I started this consultation, I did it like with all the teenagers I meet.

Initially, the idea was to set up a fairly classic reception area. But gradually the discourse and directions of work in this consultation have become more radical. These young people represented a new social fact. We stopped talking about the clinic, we talked more about sociology, to the point that I no longer understood what we were saying. The watchword was to take the request literally, not to question it and to support the transition.

All these teenagers arrive, indeed, with a very formatted speech, and with a demanding and imperative request for medical treatment, even surgical. The principle was to welcome them and to state all the tools that would be at their disposal, in particular to quickly give them addresses of endocrinologists. It was a question, in a certain way, of getting rid of the question of the body with the presupposition that this would make it possible to open up a space of psychic work, as if one could separate and split the question of the body and that of the psyche. .

 

LD: The work you were asked to do was to support the transformation without questioning the demand.

 

PA : Absolutely. It has become a work of support for the transition, in which we no longer question the demand. What disturbed me a lot was that I had, on the one hand, this speech given at the CMPP, and, on the other hand, when I started to meet these teenagers, I found myself opposite something quite different: these teenagers were quite capable, not of immediately questioning their request, but of working on the questions that led them. Clinical work could also be undertaken with the parents.

There was a field that was opening up and which did not seem to me different from what I have had to do for twenty years with adolescents. It also seems to me quite possible to build a clinical device for these adolescents but it must be very well thought out, organized, structured and must very finely articulate the somatic and psychic dimensions. It seems to me that work can really engage with them, but certainly not in the sense of offering medicalization as the only response.

 

LD: This is crucial. As Anna Cognet was saying earlier, a discourse is spreading that denies singularity in favor of an ideology.

 

PA : It is a political and militant discourse. In the multidisciplinary meetings that coordinate the requests of transgender adolescents, it is very difficult to shift and question what is said there. Clinicians tend to bend to militant discourse. It is very difficult to engage in clinical reflection.

 

LD: Do clinicians really adhere to militant discourse, or can it simply not be questioned?

 

PA : Probably both. There are issues of balance between clinicians and trans associations.

 

The sloganic thought

​

LD: Even if it were a minority in terms of representation in the university space or in the clinical space, the power of militancy has effects that are marked at the level of legislation, in the attribution of specific rights to trans people. , and in the difficulty of carrying out a clinic oriented, if I understand what you said correctly.

​

CM : That's quite right. At university, based on political correctness, "scientifically correct" as my colleague Isabelle de Mecquenem says, and after what happened with Anne Perret, that is to say an exclusion, I forged the notion of "clinically correct". And this echoes these words of Paul Ricœur that I find remarkable in a 1995 interview: “The harm caused by political correctness becomes obvious when we begin to ban certain forms of speech. It is then freedom of expression, the formal condition of free discussion, that is threatened, and political correctness tends towards a sort of inverted McCarthyism. A strange paradox is taking shape before our eyes, namely the reversal of the libertarian ideals of the radicals of the 1970s into repressive impulses. We are completely there.

​

LD: The reactions of Paul B. Preciado in Médiapart, but also the column published in Liberation of March 31, "Transgenders and intersex people: children are people" go in the direction of "silence", even if the the least that can be said is that Elisabeth Roudinesco was clumsy. “Children are people” is an advance in psychoanalysis that is now used against the unconscious. Psychoanalysts have signed this forum.

​

CM: Right now, it's grandstand against grandstand. But that psychoanalyst colleagues join forces with trans activists advocating medico-surgical intervention on children, that seriously questions me. It would have been a forum for activists, I wouldn't have been offended at all, that's the role of activists, of activists. But there, they are academics, psychoanalysts moreover.

The debate seems totally impossible with some, especially when you are decked out in some of the most resounding qualifiers. We are sometimes accused of being right-wing and transphobic activists. How do you want to talk if you are put on the side of evil from the outset?

From now on, when a child or a teenager says: “I am not in the right body”, the instruction is to answer: “Indeed, you are not in the right body, we will accompany you to change it. »

​

LD: I was very sensitive to what Anne Perret was saying earlier: “the body is set aside”. It is a way of saying that there is a foreclosure of interpretation (2). An Argentinian colleague, Ricardo Seldes, even used this expression. A foreclosure of the unconscious and of interpretation, and therefore, in a certain way, the body is also foreclosed.

​

CM : There is a reification of the symptom. This is identity withdrawal. We no longer question the game of identifications, but we fall back on a fixed identity.

 

PA : These CMPPs are places where we work both with the dimension of the institution and that of the transfer. But there, oddly, it becomes impossible to question what is at stake in the transference. These teenagers, it seems to me, by saying they want to change their bodies, highlight the way in which the question of castration arises for them. It is the very first introduction to castration that is posed to them. It is not elaborated at all, it is as if there were mirror references, which prevent this question from being worked on.

 

LD: There is a whole psychoanalytical corpus on the modifications of the body in adolescence. Little Hans, the erection which is totally heterogeneous to him... It is unlikely that psychoanalysts would sign a text in Liberation without questioning their own position with regard to the unconscious and the body. Anna Cognet was saying earlier that the current militant trans discourse produces an exterior and an interior, a bit like in the heyday when either you were for the Party or you were against the Party.

​

AC : You would not see psychoanalysts writing a column saying that it is absolutely necessary to perform mastectomies in minors, that it is essential to give minors puberty blockers, hormones. Everyone would open their eyes wide as saucers. With the case of trans children, we encounter an activist discourse that dresses in the idea of good, and which positions itself against the fact that we are issuing an alert. Because it would be forbidden to forbid.

In fact, there is not that much transactivism. They are not that numerous, and even among adults. But they are the same ones that we find in many movements related to cancel culture or woke. There has been no real ideological construction on the part of the psychoanalysts who sign these forums. They are not saying that it is absolutely necessary to operate on minors, they are just against those whom they can designate as enemies. We had never heard them come together and agree among themselves to say: "Do everything possible to allow this type of surgical and/or hormonal treatment on minors", before they had the opportunity to to oppose us, who said that it was perhaps to be questioned, that it was not obvious.

 

LD : So there, you bring something that had perhaps escaped me: there would not be a deep discourse setting itself up as an ideology, it would rather be a pure claim, a master signifier coming to represent the subject as identity, alone, without articulation, a grouping by aggregation around a signifier?

 

CM : It seems to me that there are all the same discourses that underlie them. A radicalization of gender theory: new terms, new expressions. A real newspeak. I feel like the Orwellian dystopia is happening. Young people say “I am pan”, to say “I am pansexual”, “I am non-binary” or even “I am asexual”. These words arise from a discourse, it is anchored to a doxa. Jean-François Braunstein shows this very well in his book. It is possible that young people pick up signifiers that emerge on social networks, real vectors of information and influence between peers.

 

PA : There is, it seems to me, an opportunist aspect in these speeches. – 94 –

 

CM : This is true for all ideologies: young people are the most permeable. It's the same for anti-Semitism, we see the influence on young people of certain figureheads of conspiracy, racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic "theories". Young people can easily fall prey to unscrupulous opportunists who use these “networks” to spread crazy and often dangerous ideas.

It must also be said that social networks produce new normative discourses.

 

LD: Butler has spread a lot. The conversation in Lacan Quotidien between Éric Marty and Jacques-Alain Miller is enlightening on this subject. Butler went from gender to race. Young people, but not only, intellectuals too, and activists, without going to the bottom of the reading of Butler, grab pieces, and with, build bits of speech, demands. For a young person, it can be a partial temporary identification. We must not let ourselves be fascinated by him, but rather question him. We are sometimes flabbergasted to see on social networks the semantic poverty that accompanies the claim. They are in the slogan.

 

CM : Absolutely. Pierre-André Taguieff speaks of “sloganical thinking”. He forged this neologism, and it is exactly that: a thought of the slogan which is based on ideologies. Social networks are a powerful amplifier, which affects everyone, from middle school, around 11 or 12 years old.

 

PA : The young people I met describe a trajectory that begins, not with certainties, but with questioning. Often they get depressed, they are in a quest for identification and naming, because they do not know how to name what is happening to them. On social networks, they find signifiers that they place in a position of truth, and which come to give an answer to their questions.

 

LD: Something is taking shape thanks to your Call: if we do not take the floor to produce ourselves a discourse of reading and interpretation of what is being played out, we will let events unfold which will have consequences. important and harmful for individuals, but also for society as a whole. Anne Perret was in contact with these consequences in her own clinic: the request is no longer questioned.

Second thing: these ideological discourses establish themselves in a claim by connecting with other discourses which themselves claim new rights. As a result, the system of French secularism and universalism is called into question. This brings me to what you were saying earlier: if, every time we open our mouths, we systematically find ourselves forehead to forehead and discredited on the side of the extreme right, that raises questions. Is it bullying? A challenge to freedom of expression?

​

CM : We have an example with Anne Perret. Beyond his own case, it is a sociological fact, a deontological problem. She found herself unable to continue her clinical practice, to the point that she was forced to resign. I believe

that these colleagues do not even realize it. Will there be a little awakening? I don't know. I am still optimistic, I hope there will be a small jump.

 

LD: Lacan says that the error of good faith is of all the most unpardonable...

​

PA : I felt caught in a ban on thinking, in an almost totalitarian system, with the impossibility of speaking. In my clinical practice, I no longer saw myself in a position to be able to work in confidence with my colleagues.

 

The Harmful Myth of “Childhood Self-Determination”

 

LD: “Children are people, you have to listen to what children say”: it is psychoanalysis that produced these signifiers. Except that now, we are diverting psychoanalysis by taking the word of the child literally. Lacan's famous phrase "That one says remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard" underlines the place of the unconscious in all speech. “The child is a person”, that means that he has an unconscious. To work with a child is to work with a subject in its own right, and if it is a subject, it is because he is decompleted from his unconscious, like an adult or an adolescent.

 

CM : When we accredit the thesis of the self-determination of the child without questioning the family context, the child is adultified, put in the position of a self-determined person, whom we must hear and whose request we must ratify, which is all equally remarkable. In her chapter on “the crisis of education”, Hannah Arendt writes in particular that there is a tendency to abolish the differences between adults and children, between teachers and students, in the name of equality. This leveling can only be done, she writes, at the expense of adult authority. “Freed from the authority of adults, the child has therefore not been liberated, but subjected to a much more frightening and truly tyrannical authority: the tyranny of the majority. » (3)

In Switzerland, a concerned father who participates in our work at the Observatory, Frédéric Spycher, told us that before the age of 18, without the consent of the parents, the child could request a change of first name in the civil status. The change of pronoun and first name is the first step in a social transition. In Switzerland, you do not need parental consent; in France, you have to, but there is pressure on the school system, on teachers, to accept the request of young people to change their pronoun and first name. We know the symbolic importance of a name, a first name given at birth by the parents, which thus inscribes the child in a story.

What is the meaning for a child to change his first name as he sees fit? Beyond gender issues, why can't everyone change their first name if it doesn't suit them? The slogan "Self-determination of the child" means that the child can decide for himself what is good for him or not. This is part of this anthropological mutation of which Marcel Gauchet speaks magnificently. He says that we have gone from the desire for a child to the child of desire; from the family that makes the child to the child that makes the family, it is the child of equality.

There would be work to do on this self-determination of the child so in vogue today, both on the media side and on the legal side. There was a congress at the Court of Cassation, to find out whether, on the grounds of the question of self-determination, we would accede to the request of people who say they belong to the "neutral" gender, to add a third box to marital status: neutral.

The observatory calls for laws to govern hormone-surgical treatments for minors. Some psychiatrists or endocrino-pediatricians advocate surgery (mastectomy or torsoplasty) in adolescent girls who feel bad about themselves, for their well-being. We then say: let's reflect together, take the time to think about what we are doing because we adults are responsible for these young people. Let us open a third way by extracting ourselves from ideologies.

​

LD: In an email, you told me that there was already a change in the language.

 

CM : Exactly.

 

LD: First intervention, on the language. And then, intervention on the bodies. But you point out another point: for lack of an inscription, we will say "natural", of what a man or a woman would be, identities flourish, it is of structure. Only, today, this logic is pushed to the extreme. We want to eliminate the body as given, which made Freud say, in his time, “Anatomy is destiny”.

The remark that comes to me is that today, trans people are in fact those who denote, since they make the male/female binary exist at its peak: male to female, female to male, implies the male/female binary. female. A Preciado is uncomfortable with that, because he is for a complete abolition of the genre.

​

CM : Yes, there is a rejection of the biological, it is clear, therefore of the real.

​

LD: You say that, Céline Masson, but at the demonstration on March 8, on Women's Rights Day, you are not unaware that trans people threw eggs at feminists who supported the same position as you. , and whose remarks were considered transphobic. Watch out, you're going to get eggs (laughs.)

​

AC : Lesbians who refuse to integrate trans women into their group are very, very badly perceived.

 

CM : We had the testimony of a militant lesbian woman who told us what a war it is between them and them. Trans women, who are therefore men, or women with penises, were extremely violent towards lesbians if they did not accede to their demands.

There is significant violence within LGBT circles, we learn a little more every day from the people who work with us, who are very involved in certain associations or networks. There is the testimony of Julie, who appeared in Marianne with Marie-Jo Bonnet, historian of feminism, to denounce the violence between lesbians and

trans women. It is for this reason that we should not generalize to the whole LGBT community. It is a very heterogeneous environment, with a lot of conflicts. This is why we wanted to hear from this activist, and she showed us very great violence.

 

Globality of the “cancel culture” woke

 

LD: We are going to stop soon, but allow me, Céline Masson, two more quick questions. You have done valuable work that I discovered, on ideological discourse. With intersectionality, with what happened at the March 8 demonstration where feminists were treated at the same time as transophobes and Islamophobes, giving rise to disqualification by the insult of the far right which is addressed as soon as we disagree with this movement, we see racialist and decolonialist discourses join LGBTQIA+ discourses. This globality of the woke cancel culture, do you continue to observe it? A very recent study shows, for example, that today young people are mainly in favor of the return of religious symbols to school. Is this something that continues to question you, or are you now focused only on the question of the transgender child?

​

CM : I am involved in other work on universalism. We observe a rejection of the universalist model in favor of what is called ethno-differentialism. I had published a column with Isabelle de Mecquenem (my teammate with whom we had created a vigilance committee in 2014 then the RRA), because a tag at the university had caught my attention. On November 26, 2019, a tag was discovered on the walls of the Panthéon-Assas University which combined two inscriptions: the first indicates "down with the patriarchy" and the second is grafted onto the first part of the tag "down" to associate "Jewry". I had written that this tag was a real figure of condensation, therefore overdetermined and polysemic, which combines a radical neo-feminist slogan inspired by May 68, with an expression of inextinguishable anti-Semitism. We wrote that today we are witnessing the coalescence of antagonistic ideologies, whereas in 68 “down with the patriarchy” would rather have been punctuated by “we are all German Jews”.

I had taken this slogan as a signifier, one could make an interpretation of this strikethrough of "Jewry". It was a kind of palimpsest, a superposition of tags, we don't know if it was the same person who made the two tags. A collusion between two militant groups: on the one hand, rather decolonial, intersectional and radical neo-feminist far-left militants, and on the other, anti-Semitic far-right militants.

I am on the lookout for all these signs in the social. This is why I did not want the title of the Observatory to indicate the word trans. It was not necessary to focus on the trans. What is at stake is the question of speeches, not of trans people.

For now, we are concerned with so-called transgender, gender dysphoric children, but, on the other hand, I am interested in other militant discourses such as decolonialism. Postcolonial studies are often an entry point for decolonial activism even if they are not limited to it. I'm just saying these are entryways. There is also a radicalization of gender theory. There are undoubtedly some interesting works by our colleagues who work on gender theory, but it is sometimes a way of entering queer or deco-gendered activism.

 

LD: I hope that we will have the opportunity to find you again very soon in Lacan Quotidien, because your studies are of great interest to us, Céline Masson. LQ echoes your wonderful work here, and our colleagues got to work.

 

Anne Perret, your testimony was very enlightening on the issues and the consequences in the clinic. We are not talking in the furrows of the alethosphere, these are very concrete things.

Anna Cognet argued that many adhere to the radicalism of these discourses in the name of another ideal, for example a humanist ideal for women.

children, for trans people. This affects intellectuals, academics, psychoanalysts... Hell is always paved with good intentions.

Many thanks to you three. We will continue these exchanges, we have opened a door.

 

Paris, April 3, 2021

1. https://www.marianne.net/agora/tribunes-libres/transgenrisme-avec-cet-effacement-des-limites-cest-la-suprematie-des-sentiments-qui-guide-les-conduites Tribune signed by C. Eliacheff, A. Cognet & C. Masson. 2. Seldes R., “La ley forcluye la interpretación”, Lacan Quotidien, n° 921, March 16, 2021.
3. Arendt H., The Crisis of Culture, Paris, Gallimard, 1972, p. 233.

TEXT EDITED BY LAURENT DUPONT AND J.-A. MILLER, REVIEWED BY THE PROTAGONISTS *****
OBSERVATORY WEBSITE: https://www.observatoirepetitesirene.org/ CONTACT: observatoirelapetitesirene@gmail.com
*****