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Based on an ethnographic survey conducted between March 2020 and March 2021 in a French department’s child welfare service, the article questions the ways in which gender and sex identities structure part of the social work with young migrants. Social work retains its own ambivalences towards the gender issue, inherited from the working conditions of social intervention (lack of staff, budget, places in shelters, etc.) and the emergency situations professionals have to face. The survey shows that the use of ethnicised and racialised gender and sex stereotypes by professionals is a lever for social work inasmuch as it allows them to subdivide young people’s care, and thus make it faster or simpler, in a work context under pressure and constrained by scarce resources. In spite of this, professionals are aware of the ethno-racialised gender and sex identities to which young people are subjected and use these stereotypes in their discourse in order to deconstruct them. They thus aim to accompany young people on the path of emancipation, especially since some of these assignments refer to adolescent sexualities that are considered deviant.