France

General information

Official website to request a visa

Some cities have one of:

• a trans support/rights group
• an LGBTI center
• a planned parenthood (Planning Familial) center

They may hold support meetings specifically for LGBT refugees or be able to help in English in person or online by email or social media messages.

Groups

• Fransgenre, which runs exclusively online. They have a discord server with help channels to find doctors all over France, answer questions by email, and also host resources about being trans in France and Switzerland. For instance, they have resources for immigrants to France.
• Wikitrans has articles about transitioning medically and legally.
• Organisation de Solidarité Trans, which has locations in several cities: Angoulême, Clermont-Ferrand, Grenoble, Lille, Lyon, Nîmes, Orléans, Poitiers, Reims, Saint-Denis (a parisian suburb), Strasbourg, Tours and Troyes. They hold help sessions each month in all cities, and post their dates on twitter, instagram and reddit.

Some vocabulary

• ALD (Affection Longue Durée): public healthcare system for long-term conditions, including gender dysphoria, which reimburses fully all related treatments. A doctor has to request for public healthcare to give you this status, specifying exactly which treatments to reimburse. It's recommended to ask the doctor to request all the treatments you might need.
• AME (Aide Médicale d'État): full healthcare reimbursement for irregular immigrants, needs to be applied for. This doesn't apply to you if you are here legally. You should ask refugee groups for help about this.
• CPEC (Changement de Prénom à l'État Civil): first names change on civil record
• CSEC (Changement de Sexe à l'État Civil): sex change on civil record
• CEC (Changement d'État Civil): first names and sex change on civil record at the same time
• Permanence (duty period): the common name for sessions held by organisations for people to come meet up or ask for help

Personal stories

This section consists of personal anecdotes from people living in France. Remember to take it as stories, but they can point you where you can do more research.

Trans acceptance/tolerance/friendliness

In businesses, I've never seen someone be outright excluded for being trans, but being misgendered on purpose happens.

In higher education, some universities will let you change your name on the student record without a civil record change, excluding diplomas, but this might be (purposefully?) confusing to do, so I recommend asking trans people who've done it for help.

In client accounts (ie at the bank, job center), no documents are supposed to be required to change the gender marker on there. some companies might also let you change your name without any proof.

I don't know for sure how changing your name or gender here works for non-french citizens. For french citizens, your name can be changed by request at a town hall. A gender change request has to be sent to court, will usually take longer because it has to be approved by a prosecutor, and if it rejected you will have to go to court.

Academia

Entering higher education as a USA citizen depends on the school. If it's public, you will have to pay full tuition unlike french students, usually between 1000€ and 10000€.

How to deal with the language barrier

Most businesses in cities above 50,000 population or with tourist attractions will have an employee that can speak english.

Militants in LGBT orgs are also very online so a lot of them speak english.

Outside of that, it would be hard but english has been a required language in the large majority of schools from kindergarden to the end of high school for 25 years, so most young people can understand some simple english.

What is the access to HRT

As an immigrant, if you do not have access to french public health care, none of your health care or products will be reimbursed. Everything else should be the same as for french citizens.

Hormones are only officially available in certains forms:

• Estrogen:
  • as gel, per tube: 4.66€ / 2€ with public healthcare / free with ALD
  • as patches, per 8 patches: 5.86€ / 2€ with public healthcare / free with ALD
  • as pills
• Anti-androgens:
  • bicalutamide pills, per month: 37.26€ / free with ALD
  • décapeptyl intramuscular injections, per month: 107.84€ / 48.15€ with public healthcare / unknown with ALD
• Progesterone pills, per month: 6€ / 3.90€ with public healthcare / free with ALD
• Testosterone:
  • Androtardyl intramuscular injections, per month: 7.14€ / free with ALD
  • Nébido intramuscular injections, per 2 to 4 months: 100€ to 200€, no reimbursements

Most doctors don't know how to prescribe those, and those who do often have weird ways to book appointments because they're overbooked (for example, needing to call at a specific hour to get the doctor instead of the receptionist, or telling the receptionist you're trans).

I recommend asking organisations in the city where you're looking for a doctor.

Some doctors have abusive requirements, such as asking for a gender dysphoria diagnosis by a psychiatrist even though this isn't required legally. Some psychiatrists provide gender dysphoria diagnoses no questions asked to combat this.

Avoid those who say they're in the SOFECT, FPATH or Trans-Santé: it's a network of doctors who refuse to work with doctors outside of it and have very abusive requirements like real life experiences for several years. There should be enough doctors prescribing HRT outside of their network that you shouldn't need to interact with them.

Contact us

If you know about life in France as an LGBTQ+ person or would like to ask us questions about France, you can reach out to us using the contact form.