Recently, Sweden put out a new series of Treatment guidelines that entirely drop the previous model that openly “affirms” the chosen transgender identity of a child with medication.
Just this past week, new treatment guidelines from the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW) for youth with gender dysphoria directly instruct medical providers that only psychosocial support should be the first line of treatment. This new guideline comes in the wake of a policy change from 2021 that kicked out the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoric youth, with a sole exception of a clinical research setting.
“Psychosocial support that helps the young person live with the body’s pubertal development without medication needs to be the first option when choosing care measures,” explained the guidelines, as reported by the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine.
The NBHW “deems that the risks of puberty suppressing treatment with GnRH-analogues and gender-affirming hormonal treatment currently outweigh the possible benefits, and that the treatments should be offered only in exceptional cases.”
Sweden has seemingly chosen to do away with the preference of the West for “gender identity” ideology, a set of beliefs that are not marked by Science, for gender dysphoria, which is a highly-documents psychiatric condition.
“The NBHW still considers that gender dysphoria rather than gender identity should determine access to care and treatment,’ stated the report.
This recent update is a notable detour from the previous 2015 guidelines from the country that heavily relied on the use of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health’s (WPATH) “Standards of Care 7,” stepping away from the use of a “gender affirming” model for a far more slow and cautious method that emphasizes the importance of intense psychotherapy.
WPATH has since been openly denounced across the globe by a large number of mental health and medical professionals for its “adherence to ideological views unsupported by evidence, its exclusion of ethical concerns, and its mischaracterization of basic science.”
The main three reasons that were expressed for the change were a noted lack of reliable scientific evidence, evidence of detransition, and an unexplained sharp rise in the prevalence of youth gender dysphoria, especially in adolescent girls without prior history of gender distress.
“Although the prevalence of detransition is still unknown, the knowledge that it occurs and that gender confirming treatment thus may lead to a deteriorating of health and quality of life (i.e. harm), is important for the overall judgment and recommendation,” explained the guidelines.
Teens “will need to be offered other care than hormonal treatments,” and only in extreme cases involving gender incongruence that starts in early childhood and goes past puberty, and inflicts “psychological strain” will cross-sex hormones and other puberty altering and blocking drugs be given in certain research settings.