By Jonathon Van Maren | Life Site News
The news that Denmark is moving away from the so-called “affirmative model of care” approach to youth struggling with gender dysphoria exposes, once again, how utterly radical and out of step with the rest of the world Canada and blue America are on the issue of “sex changes” for minors. Predictably, mainstream media outlets have ignored this development entirely — there is no press coverage that I can find. This may be due to the fact that this shift was published in the major medical journal Ugeskrift for Læger, the Journal of the Danish Medical Association, in Danish.
Fortunately, the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) has published a synopsis, noting that most “youth referred to the centralized gender clinic no longer get a prescription for puberty blockers, hormones, or surgery—instead they receive therapeutic counseling and support.” SEGM published a summary of the shift:
In the last several weeks, health journalists have reported that change may be afoot in Denmark. The article in Denmark’s Medical Association journal Ugeskrift for Læger leaves very little doubt that Denmark too has made a course correction in youth gender transitions, restricting this option to very few cases, while prioritizing counseling for the vast majority of the currently presenting youths. The article is an excellent summary of the rise-and-fall-of the “gender affirmation” model of care in Denmark. It describes how in 2016, following the influence of other northern European countries, Denmark chose to offer “a treatment approach with few barriers to hormone treatment for children and young people with gender dysphoria.” The treatment was justified by the foundational Dutch studies, “which indicated better well-being and body satisfaction after hormone treatment, a low degree of regret and few side effects.” However, the increasing number of referrals, changes in the presentation in gender dysphoria, and growing reports of regret—combined with a lack of long-term outcomes of the one and only sample of youth (n=55) on which the entire practice of gender transition rests—led the Danish clinicians to reverse course.
This is consistent with developments in the U.K., where the Tavistock gender clinic has been shut down and the NHS is changing course on “sex change” surgeries, and Sweden, which halted “hormone therapy” for minors in February 2022.
The Finns are following a similar path. In fact, Finnish medical guidelines distinguish between early-onset child gender dysphoria and adolescent-onset gender, stating that some gender confusion or exploration can be a natural part of growing up and almost entirely forbidding medical intervention until “identity and personality development appear to be stable.” In the meantime, psychotherapy is recommended for gender dysphoria, and surgical interventions are forbidden for those under the age of 18. Puberty blocking is also considered explicitly experimental, and if utilized in severe circumstances, the patients are sent to a research clinic and medical professionals ensure that they are “able to understand the significance of irreversible treatments and benefits and disadvantages associated with lifelong hormone therapy, and that no contraindications are present.”
Meanwhile, in Canada the National Post is reporting that Canadian surgeons are performing double mastectomies of healthy breasts on girls as young as age 14. The lawsuits have already begun as horrified young women realize they were ushered on the path to “transition” and “gender affirming care” before they could truly understand what they were doing — most recently, 21-year-old Luka Hein of Minnesota filed a lawsuit against the doctors who surgically removed her breasts at the age of 16, when she was going through a difficult time and struggled with gender dysphoria.
“I was going through the darkest and most chaotic time in my life, and instead of being given the help I needed, these doctors affirmed that chaos into reality,” she told the Daily Mail. “I don’t think kids can ever consent to having full bodily functions taken away at a young age before they even know what that means.” She’s right. The Swedes, the Finns, and now the Danes are coming to the same conclusion.
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