Gender-affirming healthcare in Denmark
While neighboring countries desist from medical transitioning for minors, Denmark still allows 15-year-olds to choose cross-sex hormones
America is undergoing a cultural meltdown over “gender-affirming” healthcare. This is the policy advocated by several leading healthcare organizations of starting the gender-transitioning of minors with gender dysphoria without necessarily conducting thorough screening or psychotherapeutic evaluation. It has led to charges of “grooming” by opponents, who in turn are accused of transphobia by supporters. President Biden recently shocked mainstream audiences by agreeing with the notorious transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney that states shouldn’t be able to ban gender-affirming care.
The UK, Sweden, and Finland had also followed policies that made it relatively easy for minors to get puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even genital surgery, but after a more careful review of the research on the practice, they reversed course and took a more cautious approach based on psychotherapy.
Although Denmark often seems fairly resistant to Anglophone woke propaganda, it isn’t immune. I wrote earlier about the so-called Normstormers’ efforts to bring transgender ideology into the primary grades and the Social Democratic administration’s proposal to remove all age requirements for legal sex change, that is, to allow parents to change an infant’s legal sex. This is after all the country that gave the world the first prominent transsexual, Lili Elbe, aka The Danish Girl (played by Eddie Redmayne), who underwent surgery in Germany in 1930.
Too young to get a tattoo
Where does Denmark stand on gender-affirming care? The Sexological Clinic at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, the country’s largest hospital, requires a comprehensive psychiatric and physical evaluation of patients with gender dysphoria. It offers counseling and appears to postpone “sexually corrective surgery” (DK) until the age of 18, but it still provides hormone treatment for minors, without always requiring their parents’ consent (DK).
In connection with a television documentary about trans kids (DK) last summer, Dr. Mette Ewers Haahr, the head of the Clinic, held a Q&A along with Malene Hilden, head of the Center for Sexual Identity, which treats gender-transitioning adults according to the relaxed guidelines of WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health). Ewers Haahr said they conduct several interviews with a child over a period of months and use puberty blockers only in rare cases when a child shows a clearly atypical gender identity over several years. They also note that genital surgery carries a risk of complications.
“What is ‘one’ exactly if one is born in the wrong body? Are you a soul in the wrong body, or what is it a person is that is independent of his or her body?”
About more critical inquiries, however, they were less than forthcoming. They ignored a question about research that contraindicates youth transitioning and sometimes gave obfuscating answers:
“What does it mean that one is “assigned” a sex at birth? Isn’t one’s sex determined at the moment the sperm cell is formed?”
“When a child is born,” Hilden answered, “the midwife, on the basis of the child’s genitals, will establish and thereby assign the child a sex and the child receives a corresponding civil registration number” [which designates the old-fashioned sex]. …
“What is ‘one’ exactly if one is born in the wrong body? Are you a soul in the wrong body, or what is it a person is that is independent of his or her body?”
“A person has various identities, and one’s sex is one of their identities,” answered Haahr. “We … can ascertain that they are best helped by changing their body and not by trying to change their gender identity, which for these people is just as stable as everyone else’s perception of their gender.”
For the many desisters and detransitioners who regret undergoing treatment, this perception wasn’t stable, or does Haahr really mean that the rest of the human race also suffers from gender dysphoria? She poses a false dichotomy between physical transitioning and “conversion therapy”—that is, attempting to cure a person’s transgender identity—when it is possible to be gender nonconforming without undergoing irreversible medical treatment, as many gays can attest.
The other side of the rainbow
Back in June, I wrote about the founding of the Danish Rainbow Council (Danske Regnbueråd). It’s an LGBT organization whose purpose is to expose and confront the dogmatic and antiscientific aspects of transgender ideology and activism. In October, it requested an interview with Ewers Haahr (DK). In an earlier interview with Information, Ewers Haahr had expressed uncertainty about the long-term benefits of transitioning and its effects on sexuality, also noting that many inquiries from girls were influenced heavily by social media.
The DRC wanted to ask Ewers Haahr why the Clinic continues to follow a lenient policy when such doubts have led to restrictions or prohibitions elsewhere in Scandinavia. It hoped to put transgender policy in the debates leading up to the recent parliamentary elections. When Haahr declined to be interviewed, the DRC sent her a long list of questions about basic issues of terminology (“Is gender dysphoria … considered a diagnosis?”), about figures on various treatments and detransitioning, and about the Clinic’s justification for depriving parents of the authority to decide whether their adolescent becomes medicalized for life.
Ewers Haahr apparently has not responded. A copy of the letter was to be sent to the Ministry of Health.
Drag queen influencers vs. stodgy parents
The DRC’s Facebook page (DK) documents many examples of transgender activism. It also features similar work by the psychotherapist Lotte Ingerslev. In a podcast with the DRC, Ingerslev discusses (DK), among other things, the prevalence of autism among children with gender dysphoria; the influence of social media, especially on girls, who make up the large majority of cases; the refusal of Sex og Samfund (the Danish version of Planned Parenthood) to say how many sexes there are; the pressure doctors feel from trans activists such as LGBTQ+ Danmark; and the fact that 15-year-olds can choose for themselves to take substances that render them infertile and unable to experience orgasm when they’re not even old enough to drink alcohol.
Ingerslev (DK) has also shown how the transgenderism section on the Danish government’s official healthcare website, sundhed.dk, defers heavily to the trans ideology of LGBTQ+ Danmark, for example, with its 30+ gender categories. LGBTQ+ Danmark also helped Copenhagen Municipality prepare a new language guide (DK) that is intended to train its staff to acknowledge citizens “as those they are.” This means avoiding words that are prejudicial, discriminatory, or condescending because they are gendered or exclusionary. “Mother” and “father,” for example, should be replaced by “parent” or “co-parent,” thus killing off the primal binary that perpetuates the species.
To be clear, I am absolutely opposed to discrimination of persons based on gender identification, and in favor of legal protections and programs to support trans people and especially young people with gender dysphoria. I want to warn against the kind of biology denialism and zealotry that I believe is hurting American children and exacerbating the nasty culture wars (for a sample, see the Reality’s Last Stand and Year Zero Substacks). And for a realistic approach to transgender inclusion, see the Danish Sports Confederation’s guidelines.
Thanks, Cataleptic.
It's true that there isn't much public awareness here about transgender policies.
If anyone is making a concerted effort to warn Sundhedstyrelsen about WPATH and transitioning minors, it would be Dansk Regnbueråd (The Danish Rainbow Council), as I described - link to its FB page in the post. It's in Danish, like its website, but you can write to them in English. Here's a summary of its initiatives in English:
https://danskregnbueraad.dk/12-initiatives-to-fight-extreme-gender-ideology/
Thanks for this and I'm definitely with you. After the exposé of the WPATH scandal with it's connections to obscene vile child pornography sites, together with it's latest revision of it's so-called guidelines which abandon virtually any idea about safeguarding through use of age limits, I wrote to the Danish sexological institute at Riget alerting them of WPATHS degeneracy, and recommending they sever all association with this porn saturated quacksalver institution. But they were obviously already aware and had quietly decided to look the other way and stir up as little attention as possible on the matter, so I got a polite e-mail back saying a lot of hot air amounting basically to that they would politely be ignoring me.
I now realise that it probably was a mistake to write to them, and that I should have written to the Danish Sundhedsstyrelsen who almost certainly are in the dark about it all. Perhaps a concerted letter writing campaign to Sundhedsstyrelsen might have an effect, because I'm certain the medical community in general in Denmark don't have a clue about any of this murky side of the ideology, and imagine all is rainbows and a a natural extension of the campaign for gay rights and so on. Most of them will never have even heard of WPATH, and I imagine would be shocked to know the truth. Denmark most definitely needs to follow the lead of the Karolinska Institute, perhaps not necessarily going so far as to report itself to the police for malpractice, but urgently needs to reconsider its position on puberty blockers, and to unambiguously declare itself no longer affiliated with the disgraceful WPATH.