Chemical Castration : The Same Syringe for Children and Monsters

Her name was Lyhanna Rameau Bernard. Eleven years old, a schoolbag, friends at school, the age when you are still allowed to be afraid of the dark and not of a grown man. On May 29, 2026, she vanished outside her middle school in Fleurance, in the Gers. Seven days later, her body was found in an abandoned grain silo. There are names one wishes never to have to write. This little girl’s name should remain that of a child, not that of a case. Forgive me, then, for making it the starting point of an argument all the same: it is precisely because I refuse to let her become one more emotion, quickly consumed and quickly forgotten, that I want to set down, in cold blood, what shock keeps us from thinking.

For shock has already produced its reflexes. Within hours, public debate reached for its two totems: the death penalty and chemical castration. A CSA poll for Europe 1, CNews and the JDD put numbers to the anger: 83% of the French say they favor mandatory chemical castration for child sex offenders, 87% among women, as high as 92% among those aged 18 to 24, and near unanimity on the right, 94% among LR voters, 97% at the Rassemblement National. Bruno Retailleau, a candidate who knows how to read a wave, promptly proposed making the measure mandatory for the most dangerous predators. All of this is human. All of this is understandable. And all of it misses a fact that almost no one dares put on the table.

What the Law Already Allows, and What It Refuses

Let us begin by clearing up the misunderstanding, because you cannot think well from a false premise. Chemical castration is nothing new that we would simply need to vote into law. It has existed in France since the Guigou law of 1998. Its real name is libido-inhibiting treatment. It is not a punishment; it is a medical act, reversible, whose effects cease once it stops. A judge may order treatment as part of court-ordered supervision, but he never decides the nature of that treatment: only the physician prescribes it, and he declines to do so notably in cases of established mental illness. Since the 2010 law, the convict’s written consent is no longer required on the judicial side, yet medical ethics and our international commitments still require the person’s agreement before the product can actually be administered.

Here is the wall against which the magic word “mandatory” shatters. You can vote a constraint into law, but you cannot conscript a doctor to drive a needle by force into a man held down. The result is that today barely 10 to 15% of sex offenders actually receive this treatment in France, a lower rate than in Germany or Canada. And let us add the essential point that the peddlers of slogans always forget: these molecules lower the hormonal drive, but they do not touch the psychic mainspring of the predator, the craving for domination, for destruction, for power over someone weaker. The urge subsides; the obsession remains. Chemical castration is not a lock; at best it is a speed bump.

Keep this picture in mind: a state that surrounds itself with a thousand precautions before imposing these products on a criminal, in the name of consent and of the integrity of the human body. Hold on to it, because what follows will make your head spin.

The Molecule No One Dared Name

Now let us ask the question the television studios never asked. Chemically speaking, what are we talking about when we say “chemical castration”? A family of products, part of which is identical to what we administer to children. And this is where the floor gives way. One of them goes by a name you may already have seen on a prescription: triptorelin, sold under the brands Decapeptyl and Gonapeptyl. It is one of the molecules of chemical castration for an adult man. And it is, exactly, what we also inject into children: it is the standard treatment for precocious puberty, there fully within its marketing authorization, and it is also, this time off-label, what we politely call the “puberty blockers” prescribed to minors questioning their gender. Chemical castration and puberty blockade are not distant cousins: in part, they are the same syringe.

How does it work, without playing pharmacologist? These products, the GnRH analogues, lull to sleep the hormonal command center lodged in the brain: stimulate it without respite, and you end up shutting down the production of testosterone and estrogen, down to what is called a castration level. Nothing is cut; the switch is simply flipped off. And the same lever is pulled whether for an adult offender or, at the other end of life, for a child treated for precocious puberty.

What should give us pause is that the hormones being switched off do not serve reproduction alone. In adolescence, they shape the sexual characteristics, but also the bones and the brain, within a developmental window that does not come around twice. On bone, the literature is clear: the loss of bone density is documented, to the point of capping how long the product may be used. On the brain, let us show an honesty the activists do not impose on themselves: we do not know, and that is precisely what should chill us. The recent reviews say so plainly. No human study has seriously measured the impact of these treatments on neuropsychological function with adequate follow-up, there is no evidence that the cognitive effects are fully reversible once treatment stops, and some data suggest an adverse impact on a child’s IQ. The Cass Review, in the United Kingdom, concludes that research on neurocognitive development under blockers remains very limited. We halt the development of a child’s brain during its critical window, and we tick the box marked “reversible” without the slightest proof that it is.

The World Turned Upside Down

Let us set the two scenes side by side and look at them squarely.

First scene. A man has raped, perhaps killed. Society, in its overwhelming majority, would like these molecules forced into him. But the state takes a thousand precautions. It invokes the integrity of the human body, consent, the physician’s code of ethics, our international commitments. It prefers a treatment that reaches 10 or 15% of offenders rather than cross the line into medical coercion. You may find that frustrating. You may also see in it the mark of a civilization that, even when facing its monsters, refuses to dispose of bodies.

Second scene. A child, perfectly healthy, in the throes of doubt about himself, as every adolescent has been since the world began. To that child we prescribe, off-label, these same molecules with their heavy and possibly irreversible effects, in the name of an ideology that presents as neutral care what science describes as a leap into the unknown. And here, all at once, no one invokes the integrity of the body. No one speaks of truly informed consent, even though we are talking about a minor. No one demands the precautionary principle we brandish over a tub of yogurt.

There it is, the world turned upside down. What we hesitate to impose on the worst among us in the name of human dignity, we administer to our children in the name of a fashion. The same molecule, two standards, two measures, and the scale tips the wrong way.

Let me be clearly understood: I am not writing that chemically castrating criminals would be the right answer. I am writing the opposite, that it is a false debate stirred up to avoid confronting the real one. And I note that France is not alone in opening its eyes to the second scene. A Senate bill in May 2024 sought to ban the prescription of puberty blockers to minors in the treatment of gender dysphoria, the National Academy of Medicine having called for caution as early as February 2022. The United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland have already pulled back. When countries no one will suspect of reactionary leanings hit the brakes, the doubt is serious.

What Lyhanna Deserved

There remains the real question, the one that unsettles because it offers no slogan. What would have protected Lyhanna? Not the chemical castration of a man who had never been tried. The suspect was already known, already in the records, the subject of reports and complaints, including a complaint for the rape of a minor left unprocessed at the time of the killing. The Minister of Justice himself publicly acknowledged the institution’s failure. France had, moreover, been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights in April 2025 for its failings in handling the rape of minors.

The gap this child slipped through was not the absence of a hormonal product. It was the absence of a complaint acted upon, of an investigation carried out, of a dangerous man removed in time. Mandatory chemical castration is the easy promise made to public opinion to avoid paying the hard price: magistrates, investigators, resources, a criminal justice system that does not file away a complaint for the rape of a child the way one files a parking ticket.

So yes, let us talk about molecules. But let us begin with the ones we already inject into healthy children while we hesitate so much for criminals. And above all, let us stop believing that a syringe will excuse us from making justice work. Lyhanna Rameau Bernard deserved a Republic that protects her before the tragedy, not a Republic that takes revenge after. The rest is only noise to cover the silence of a system that failed to hear her.