Sweden Documents 1,500 Percent Rise in Teenage Gender Dysphoria Since 2008 as Public Outcry Grows
The country of Sweden has revealed a monumental rise in teenage gender dysphoria diagnoses over a ten-year period.
The Guardian reports Sweden's Board of Health and Welfare has confirmed a 1,500 percent rise in gender dysphoria diagnoses among 13-to 17-year-olds born as girls between 2008 and 2018. The findings were revealed in a recently released report.
In the fall of 2018, the government proposed a law pushed by the Swedish LGBT group RFSL that would reduce the minimum age for sex reassignment medical care from 18 to 15, remove all need for parental consent, and allow children as young as 12 to change their legal gender.
Public backlash against the proposed law began in March of last year when Christopher Gillberg, a psychiatrist at Gothenburg's Sahlgrenska Academy wrote an op-ed in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper cautioned that surgery and hormone treatments conducted on children was a "big experiment" which could become one of the Scandinavian country's worst medical scandals, according to The Guardian.
Then last October, an investigative news program looked into the methods used at Stockholm's Karolinska University hospital, which specializes in treating minors with gender dysphoria. The hospital has been criticized for performing double mastectomies on self-identifying transgenders as young as 14.
Several media outlets also profiled cases of former transgenders who regretted their surgeries, including one report by Filter magazine on the case of a 32-year-old transgender woman who committed suicide four years after her surgery. A psychosis expert later determined after reading through her medical journal that the person clearly showed signs of mental problems at the time she first tried to get gender dysphoria treatment. One clinic refused to treat her. However, when she approached the Karolinska Hospital, they went ahead with the procedure, according to the newspaper.
The government is responding to the public outcry. The proposed bill to lower the minimum legal age for sex reassignment surgery was shelved. The Board of Health and Welfare was ordered to study the evidence issue its findings. The report is scheduled to be released on March 31.
The government agency's most recent report also disclosed 32.4 percent of 13 to 17-year-olds with gender dysphoria registered at birth as women also had diagnoses for anxiety disorder, 28.9 percent had depression, 19.4 percent had ADHD, and 15.2 percent had autism, according to The Guardian.
