The national conservative Sweden Democrats party has pledged to repeal the country’s new controversial ‘Gender Affiliation Act’
that came into effect on Tuesday, July 1st, proposing a three-step plan
instead to fix the “madness” of ‘trans-affirming’ medical procedures
exploiting minors if elected next year.
The new law allows minors to change their legal gender from the age
of 16—as long as their adult guardian consents—and makes it easier for
individuals identifying as transgender to get sex-change surgery without
the need for a ‘gender dysphoria’ diagnosis or the permission of the
National Board of Health and Welfare.
The law was approved in the Swedish parliament in April 2024 by a
broad coalition of six parties from far-left to center-right, with only
the national conservative Sweden Democrats (SD) and the smaller
Christian Democrats (KD) voting against it.
As we wrote earlier, Sweden Democrat MP Richard Jomshof described the change as “madness, insanity, and folly,” while journalist Anders Gustafsson joked that it would soon be “easier to change your legal gender than to buy a bottle of wine during a vineyard visit” in Sweden.
And while the parliament adopted the bill with 234 votes in favor and
only 94 against, public opinion seems to reflect the exact opposite
ratio among regular Swedes. A poll conducted around the time found that 59% percent viewed it negatively, while only 22% supported it; the rest were undecided or afraid to state their opinion.
To mark its implementation, three SD lawmakers—Jessica Stegrud, Carita Boulwén, and Leonid Yurkovskiy—wrote an opinion piece in Svenska Dagbladet,
criticizing the legislation as both “ill-conceived and harmful” to
minors, and pledging to repeal it in the next parliamentary term if
their party gets elected to the government in September 2026.
In the article, the MPs argue that the new law removes crucial
medical safeguards and risks pushing vulnerable minors toward making
life-altering decisions that they will come to regret later.
These teenagers often confuse ‘normal’ psychological conditions (such
as anxiety or depression) with gender dysphoria, they write, and while a
significant number of gender identity issues automatically resolve
after puberty, the effects of hormone therapy and sex-change surgery
cannot be reversed.
To underline this point, the MPs recalled cases when teenagers,
typically girls, underwent irreversible procedures such as mastectomy,
only to later change their minds as adults when they realized that
transitioning only worsened their mental health issues.
Therefore, the Sweden Democrats laid down three concrete proposals in
response that they would enact once in government, the first of which
is to immediately repeal the gender identity law.
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