SWEDEN: The first country to introduce legal gender reassignment, Sweden has commenced putting brakes on the gender reassignment hormone treatment for minors. Sweden, like most western countries, struggles with this highly sensitive issue.
The medical fraternity has been trying to analyse the risks and the precautions in relation to not creating treatment provisions for those with “gender dysphoria.”
In February 2022, Sweden decided to cease hormonal therapy for minors, apart from very rare cases. The National Board of Health and Welfare said in February 2022 that mastectomies for teenage girls wanting to transition should be restricted to a research setting. Young teens wanting to transition have been given puberty blockers in order to delay any concrete physical alterations.
There has been a leap in the number of people going through gender dysphoria in Sweden, as is the case in a lot of other countries. Gender dysphoria happens when a person becomes anxious because of an established mismatch between their biological sex and the gender they identify with.
According to the Board of Health and Welfare, nearly 8,900 people in Sweden were diagnosed with gender dysphoria between 1998 and 2021. 820 cases were registered in 2021 alone.
13- to 17-year-old females have been the most affected, with an increase of 1,500 percent since 2008. Mikael Landen, the chief physician at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg had contributed to the scientific study on which the Board of Health made its decision.
Landen said, “It used to be a male phenomenon, and now there is a strong female overrepresentation.” “Tolerance has been high in Sweden for at least the last 25 years,” he said when asked if it was simply a result of a more accepting society.
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