ABSTRACT
Sex/gender norms impact our entire lives. Protagonists of medicine play a certain role in transferring these norms. Medical procedures assign a sex/gender to a child at birth, albeit without any certainty that they will ultimately perceive this assignment as appropriate. Not all children accept the assigned sex/gender. Some reject them. The reasons for this remain unclear. To date, physicians and psychologists have failed to explain that this rejection involves pathology. Still, “diagnoses” such as transsexuality, gender identity disorder, gender dysphoria are at least suggestive of mental pathology without being conclusively or scientifically validated. The reason given is that an explicit diagnosis is a precondition for insurance coverage for hormone therapy or surgery. Thus, prepubertal minors are subjected to a medical discourse toward which they are unable to play active roles: the everyday reality of them is completely unaffected by the question of medical reimbursements. This chapter takes up childhood life situations, examines incoherencies within medical argumentation, and asks what role, if any, medicine might play in promoting the best interests of minor children.
