Gender medicine’ for minors or the Hippocratic sermon

Revue-Psy - 14 Avril 2025

By Caroline Eliacheff and Céline Masson

https://www.revue-psy.fr/2025/03/05/la-medecine-de-genre-pour-mineurs-ou-le-sermon-dhippocrate-4392/

“(…) For medicine, being a compendium of successive and contradictory errors made by doctors, when calling upon the best among them, one is very likely to seek a truth that will be recognized as false a few years later. Thus, to believe in medicine would be the ultimate folly, if not believing in it were not an even greater one, for from this heap of errors a few truths have eventually emerged.”

— Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

The history of medicine is punctuated by errors rooted in belief systems. While some remedies have proven ineffective yet harmless to patients, others have had detrimental effects on health. Medicine progresses through trial and error: it is not an exact science but rather a clinical practice based on evidence—what is called Evidence-Based Medicine.

However, when doctors are influenced by cognitive biases tied to certain beliefs, their judgment and rationality can be impaired. These biases risk affecting their decision-making and influencing the choice of the most appropriate treatment for patients.

Doctors working in specialized services in “transgender medicine,” “sex identity,” or “gender medicine” for minors are particularly prone to interpreting symptoms through the lens of their belief that adolescents must be helped to change sex (disregarding biology)—or rather, to change their bodies—based on their feelings. However, this medical approach is heavily contested, as no conclusive evidence currently demonstrates the benefits of these treatments compared to their risks for minors. In the absence of solid data regarding their benefits and risks, it becomes difficult for a physician to properly care for a patient.

Researchers have identified an “overconfidence bias” in medicine, leading to an overestimation of doctors’ knowledge, rationality, and predictive abilities. Neuropsychologist Sally Baxendale also highlights “cognitive biases” influencing decision-making across all areas of medicine, including gender medicine for minors. These biases are particularly evident in historical medical scandals analyzed in The Sermon of Hippocrates (2025), whether it be lobotomy practices, the treatment of hysteria in women, child masturbation in the 19th century, or the psychiatric treatment of homosexuality.

We hypothesize that these biases, by reinforcing certain beliefs, continue to affect current clinical practice, notably in France. Clinicians working within the same specialized service are even more exposed and thus more likely to adopt these beliefs. However, some doctors have become aware of these mechanisms through clinical observation: on the one hand, it was no longer the same types of young patients arriving (more girls, and older); on the other hand, these young people did not necessarily improve after transitioning. Faced with outcomes that contradicted their expectations, they raised the alarm—following the example of pioneers like Kenneth Zucker in Canada, Riittakerttu Kaltiala in Finland, and Stephen Levine in the United States. Today, these doctors call for solid scientific evidence, where it remains lacking. Consequently, they have adapted their practices and now advocate for caution.

We believe that modifying the bodies of minors—who often will not pursue transition later, caught instead in an identity quest and pubertal sexuation anxiety (see ASP on this same site)—constitutes what we term pedomisia.

What is Pedomisia?

In The Sermon of Hippocrates, we coined this neologism from two Greek roots: “pædo-” from paidos (παιδός), meaning “child,” and “-misia” from misos (μῖσος), meaning “hatred.” Thus, pedomisia literally means “hatred of children”—specifically, virtuous hatred, acting in the name of good and love. It differs from the ambiguous term pedophilia—meaning “love of children”—which refers to sexual abuse.

While hatred is a passion, virtuous hatred is a perversion. In this sense, it drives what we call transversion, an ideology whose political project is to dismiss fundamental facts—such as the difference between the sexes—and invent an alternative fiction. Transversion is an insidious reversal of values that impacts both the bodies and psyches of children and adolescents. This project is carried out by transactivists (not necessarily transgender individuals) who have imposed themselves on doctors in gender medicine services.

Pedomisia in Medicine

In medicine, pedomisia—the virtuous hatred of the child—manifests through doctors’ desire to “do good” for young people who seek to change their sex, primarily via medical and even surgical interventions.

What are the recommendations of this form of gender medicine? Administration of puberty blockers from Tanner stage 2, around age 11 or 12 (sometimes earlier or later); cross-sex hormones at age 16 to modify the body’s appearance in line with the “gender identity”; and—though less common in France—breast removal surgeries in girls under 18.

Pedomisia describes a situation where adults, in the name of children’s rights as “persons” and legal subjects, project a plan onto them. Based on the child’s expressed desires and will, the adult fulfills these requests—even when the consequences may be harmful.

This phenomenon is closely tied to transactivism, a radical ideology that, to impose itself as the norm, seeks to recruit children—particularly through medicine for those declaring themselves transgender.