Christian Flavigny is a child psychiatrist, psychoanalyst; member of the Thomas More Institute family-work group. He is the author of
The Confiscated Debate - PMA, GPA, bioethics, gender, #metoo, etc.
(Salvator, 2019).
The Court of Cassation ruled that a man who has legally become a woman does not necessarily become the "mother" of his child, refuting the plea considering that a parent, once recognized as a "woman", would logically become a mother.
The Court based its decision on "the best interests of the child", dismissing the complainant's aspiration.
How is this interest in fact protected by a decision that did not take into account the feelings of it?
This calls for clarifying, not only negatively but positively, what “being a mother” is.
To be a mother is to have shared the relationship of childbirth with a man who thereby became the "father".
It is above all to be born a girl and to have been the child of her parents: this childhood experience in the relationship with parents, whether marked by happiness or heartbreak (most often a mixture of the two), prepares the girl. to forge the maternal bond, a woman's own ability to talk to her baby about her stammering emotions, awakening her to herself from the interior of her nascent emotional life.
This disposition characterizes the maternal function, from which the father is necessarily excluded from this symbiosis, he who is in charge of mediating the “mother-child dyad” from a situation of exteriority.
For the father as for the mother, the impressions of their childhood, of boy and son for him, of girl and daughter of his parents for her, with their joys and their difficulties, are the guide allowing to feel as closely as possible the needs of their child and therefore to play their role of parents.
The function of the legal system is to promote the development of the maternal and then family bond.
The function of the legal system is to promote the development of the maternal and then family bond;
his classic statement
"mater certissima"
plays this role by reinforcing the expectation of the child of an unconditional maternal love, in contrast with the conditional love of the father that the child must win through his efforts and the father prove by its involvement.
But it also had the function of protecting against any substitution of child at birth, a fear which went so far as to resort to witnesses, childbirth being the legal benchmark certifying maternity.
This function of law, shaken up by the progress of techniques and the evolution of customs, is above all trapped by the invasion of French law inherited from the Latin tradition, by the principles of Anglo-Saxon law which emanates from a culture that does not exist. not integrating in its principles the creation of the filial bond, ignoring it or valuing a conception of the law which does not interfere with "private life".
The decision of the Court of Cassation thus appears to be the successful attempt to counter the Anglo-Saxon drift of French law, in other words to restore the filial link, and therefore the child's need, to the principle of laws relating to the family, which has unfortunately been overlooked by recent laws (on marriage and adoption in 2013, on bioethics - law currently undergoing second parliamentary reading).
It is first of all the interests of the child, so that the logic of his coming into the world is not blurred, which is the basis of his raison d'être.
But it is also the interest of the adult concerned.
Nothing allows to prejudge the love that she / he will be able to bring to his / her child, and nothing contradicts that there is an intense maternal fiber;
but for this to become marked with the seal of legal validation would make a false veneer of the attitude of truth which makes each parent raise their child from the experience, simple or tormented, of their own past as a boy or girl.
The law decreed by the Court of Montpellier trapped the authenticity of the relationship of this parent to his child;
the Court of Cassation spared them this trap.
French law must refuse the falsification caused by the fact of ratifying the aspiration of adults requesting a change of sex, without considering the repercussions, on the child when the family bond is concerned, and on the community.
More generally, French law must refuse the falsification caused by the fact of ratifying the aspiration of adults requesting a change of sex, without considering the repercussions, on the child when the family bond is concerned, and on the community.
This would call for this change not to be masked and to remain mentioned in the civil status, just taking the precaution that it is neither the subject of criticism nor of discrimination.
In addition, an effective reflection on the change of sex when it is requested by minor children is required in our social life.
French culture, through a complete understanding of the psychic life of the child, cannot ignore the fact that it is witnessed by a disarray which calls for a great deal of reflection and caution, and not invasive treatments and hasty decisions in the Anglo-way. Saxon, which can lead to catastrophic regrets.
The French perspective of law is all the more essential to preserve and promote, since the filial bond which it takes into account, in the interest of the child, is the matrix of what becomes the social bond in collective life.
