The teenager's bed remained intact.
Placed on the blue sheets, a big brown teddy bear still sits near the pillows, four other small colored stuffed animals embrace it.
The farewell sign sent by Maxence to his mother before his final departure in a wood, in Vannes, on May 8, 2019. The weather was stormy when, that evening, he was discovered by his best friend, hanged to a tree.
He was about to turn 18 and was born a daughter, Clara, one day in June 2001.
Two years after Maxence's death, in the charming family home, little girl's toys are still mixed with the bodybuilding equipment that the teenager has been using in recent years to forge a man's body at all costs.
A child, become a son, that his mother, Yolande Miel, 59, decided to tell in the feminine, as in the masculine, in a blog then in a book published at the end of March "Maxence or the diary of a wobbly guy" ( Ed. Paulo-Ramand).
The story of a double journey: that of Maxence, consumed by anxieties linked to transidentity and the death of her father in 2015, and that of her mother, plunged into a world she knew nothing about, against the prejudices of which she was kneaded.
"It's horrible to see your child hating himself so much"
It is from the third grade that Clara begins to change her appearance by giving up her long brown hair.
“I took her to the hairdresser who first gave her a short, worked cut.
But, disappointed, she returned to do a boyish cut, says Yolande.
Then, and there I had a hard time accepting it, she completely shaved her head.
"
Her attire is changing: she now wears only black, her t-shirts and other "fluttering dresses" give way to wide pants and long-sleeved shirts, under which she hides her forms and scarifications.
She, who was such a good student, sees her grades drop.
“It is said that transgender people know very early on that they were not born in the right body.
For Clara, it was different, assures the fifty-something.
It really came in adolescence.
"
Clara, in 2015, shortly after moving to Vannes.
LP / DR
Mother-daughter relationships deteriorate very quickly.
"She no longer spoke to me, or else snapped at me, she refused all physical contact.
She was so aggressive that sometimes she scared me, ”Yolande remembers, her throat still tied.
“It's horrible to see your child hating himself so much.
Thinking of facing a particularly difficult adolescent crisis, she sent him to a specialist educator, then to a psychologist.
But Clara, whom Yolande still calls "my Girly", moves further away.
Coming out in 2017
His coming out dates back to April 2017. Sitting on the comfortable yellow sofa in the living room, the teenager, then in second grade, and her mother watch a TV movie: a man plays a father in transition (process of change of gender role). “She gets annoyed, tells me that it's not believable, that we should have asked a real trans to play. And there, she tells me about a friend who takes testosterone. "
For Yolande, this confession is a first shock.
The fifty-year-old native of eastern France, widow of a gendarme, knows nothing about the world her daughter speaks to her so ardently.
For her, trans people come down to "drag queens from Almodóvar's films", "prostitutes from the Bois de Boulogne".
“I didn't want to see, it was beyond me.
This world was unknown to me, I was full of clichés, I did not understand.
"
The next day, she receives an SMS.
"The friend I told you about who is transgender, he's not my friend, he's me."
This time, "the earth is opening up" under his feet, writes Yolande.
“My brain is thinking fast and I catch myself in the moment.
You may not be my daughter anymore, but you are my child, I must support you and reassure you.
"
From Clara to Maxence
Very quickly, Clara tells him that she has chosen to be called Maxence. "I liked Maxime, but there are too many Maxime," he explains. At the same time, Yolande tries to assimilate the rare information that she can glean on the Internet. She buys a book in English, the only one she can find on the subject. “There is so much content today on transgender people, but at the time it was a subject that we talked about a lot less. In four years, that has changed enormously, ”she notes.
Yolande makes an appointment with an endocrinologist to initiate the physical transition, an important step that includes testosterone injections.
But Maxence's medical examinations do not yet allow him to start treatment.
He has to wait a month.
For him, it's a month too long.
Devastated, the 16-year-old makes his first suicide attempt.
A portrait of Maxence.
LP / DR
During his stay of several weeks in the hospital, he kept a diary: "Maxence or the diary of a wobbly guy". He tells, with a pretty sharp pen, his life among adolescents with behavioral disorders. In it, he describes his outbursts of anguish, the illness of his father, whom he has never mourned for, his fear that we discover that he is not "a cis guy" (for cisgender, when the felt gender of a person corresponds to that of his birth). On a forum, he also comments on his mother's efforts to support him: "She reacted better than I thought", he testifies.
Yet their relationship remains strained.
Maxence still does not communicate with her.
He even includes it in the “list of things that stress (him)”, next to “back to school”, “high school”, “the near and distant future”, “my past”, “my dysphoria” (la gender dysphoria describes the distress of the transgender person when faced with a mismatch between their assigned sex and their gender identity).
"I hoped that he was relieved to have been able to talk to me about his transidentity, but I did not have the feedback", regrets Yolande.
"It was much better"
At the end of 2017, Maxence received his first injections of testosterone and began his physical transition, supported by his friends and his small theater group. He adopts a masculine look, wears a binder - compressive bra to hide the chest - shaves the few beard hairs that grow, his voice moved. At the start of 2018, “things were going much better! »Relates Yolande. Family relationships are relaxed. He leaves his bedroom door ajar again, stays a little longer at the table. He even dares a few smiles when he observes his mother with his new companion. “We manage to do a series of TV evenings together. I wasn't worried anymore, ”she recalls.
In her living room, the fifty-something has allowed herself two photos of Maxence.
"This one, I adore it," enthuses Yolande, pointing to a young man of 17, short brown hair and incipient mustache, bass guitar in hand and slight repressed smile.
“It was a great day, we had robbed the stores.
Next door, in the guest room, five pictures of Clara, long brown locks tied in a ponytail, tight pants and large sunglasses, have been posted on the wall since the little family left the area. Parisian for Vannes, early 2015. “Maxence never asked me to remove them,” notes the mother, satisfied.
Maxence, 17, with his bass guitar.
LP / DR
But 2019 arrives, and "everything collapses", wrote the teenager in his notebooks.
Why ?
“No one has ever been able to tell me,” says his mother.
“A few days after the New Year, Maxence asked not to go to class, he was not feeling well.
Headache ?
At the belly ?
No way of knowing.
One morning, the school contacted Yolande.
“Maxence needs to be hospitalized,” the school nurse told him.
The fifty-year-old is petrified.
Her child has taken medication, he has "a precise scenario", we explain to him: "Go to the theater in Lorient with his class the next day and then commit suicide".
The teenager leaves for a specialized clinic, which he will leave at the beginning of March, his dark thoughts behind him, seem to believe the professionals, like his relatives.
"I have a bursting chest"
When it comes out, hope is reborn. Yolande takes Maxence to Paris to attend the concert of her favorite group, the Twenty One Pilots. "You let yourself be photographed, you know it's important to me. It's your way of saying goodbye to me, ”writes the fifty-year-old, who now relives these moments as“ a parenthesis, a reprieve ”. It is by noting that her child slackens the rhythm of her hormonal treatment that she senses that the "fight is lost".
“My chest is bursting, I can't breathe.
I'm going to bed, ”Maxence wrote on May 8, in a last text message, a few seconds before getting on his bike and reaching the woods in which he will end his life.
The day before, he shone on stage, during the end-of-year show of his theater group.
“He had repressed too much.
He was so consumed by his anxieties, his future, his transformation… The depression had already set in, despite our support and taking charge of his transidentity ”, Yolande thinks today.
To read also “Being a woman among women”: Céline, transgender, tells her story
She, the least literary of the family, then took up the pen to face this mourning, as a tribute to her child and to her husband, both passionate about writing. Her blog, which has become a book and in which she explains to Maxence everything she would have liked to say to him, has had little success. Adolescents approached her. Yolande is now trying to make them understand that parents are not necessarily enemies, that they can also talk to professionals, that associations are there for them. She now plans to intervene in high schools. “Sometimes I say to myself:
damn, Maxence left too early
. But all the others remain, ”she explains.