While puberty blockers have just been banned from public care facilities for transgender minors in the United Kingdom, a report by French senators from the conservative Les Républicains (LR) party calls for a ban on all access to gender-affirming hormones. In France, there is no data on the number of transgender young people. In the United States and Canada, it is estimated that 1.2% of teenagers are transgender. Only some of them wish to undergo medical transition.

It is also difficult to estimate the number of prescriptions: Puberty blockers and hormones are prescribed not only to transgender teens. However, if we look at the sample of patients at the specialized practice at the La Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, of the 239 transgender patients over the last 10 years, less than half used such treatments. On average, the treatment begins 10 to 14 months after the beginning of consultations between a family and medical teams.

For around 40 years, these synthetic hormones have been used to treat early onset puberty, defined as occurring before age 8 in girls and age 9 in boys. The treatment typically lasts two to three years and works by inhibiting the activation of the gonads (ovaries and testicles) and the production of sex hormones (estrogen and testosterone). Among other things, it prevents the premature cessation or slowing of growth that occurs at puberty.

These molecules have been prescribed to transgender minors, from age 8 to 14 depending on the situation, since the late 1990s in the Netherlands and since the 2010s in France. According to various studies in Europe, between 10% and 40% of transgender minors use them. To date, in France, they are prescribed off-label, as may be authorized by law when justified in the patient's interest. In a 2020 document available online, the National Council of the Order of Physicians pointed out that 80% of prescriptions in university hospital pediatrics are made off-label.

The aim here is to "reduce the young person's suffering in the face of the bodily changes brought on by puberty (breasts, hair, voice, muscle mass) while giving them time to explore their identity," said Professor Laetitia Martinerie, a pediatric endocrinologist at Robert-Debré Hospital, who sees minors with questions and/or in transition in a specialized multidisciplinary consultation.

Treatment can be discontinued at any time and if it is interrupted physiological puberty will resume. Blockers are stopped after testosterone is introduced in trans males, or after testicles are removed on coming of age in others. The various studies on this subject show very low rates of discontinuation of puberty blockers prior to hormone intake (less than 2% in a cohort of 6,793 young people aged 12 to 18 in the Netherlands), pointing to a persistent desire to transition in these young people.

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