As you know, if you raise any questions or doubts about aggressive gender-reassignment medicine for young people, you will be called a hater, a bigot, and maybe even a murderer since it is alleged that young people denied treatment will commit suicide in larger numbers.
And yet, as the Wall Street Journal notes today, the United States is the liberal outlier in permissiveness toward such treatment. Many European nations, especially the Scandinavian countries, have recently moved to restrict or ban the practice:
U.S. Becomes Transgender-Care Outlier as More in Europe Urge Caution
he U.S. is becoming an outlier among many Western nations in the way its national medical institutions treat children suffering from distress over gender identity.
For years, the American healthcare industry has staunchly defended medical interventions for transgender minors, including puberty blockers, which suppress the physical changes of adolescence as a treatment for those distressed over their gender.
The European medical community, by contrast, is expressing doubts about that approach. Having allowed these treatments for years, five countries—the U.K., Sweden, Finland, Norway and France—now urge caution in their use for minors, stressing a lack of evidence that the benefits outweigh the risks. This month, the U.K.’s publicly funded National Health Service limited the use of puberty blockers to clinical trials, putting the drugs beyond the reach of most children.
If you ask a “progressive” what nations the U.S. ought to emulate, the Scandinavian countries always come out on top. People like Bernie Sanders and AOC suffer from a deep case of “Denmark envy” and what I call “the Swedish swoon.” They like these countries for their socialism, and especially their “tolerance” and open-mindedness. (They should, however, check in for recent changes in Scandinavian attitudes about immigration.)
Question: Given these countries have cut way back on the transgender mania, are all those Scandinavian socialists now to be regarded as haters and bigots?
P.S. The United States generally had much more liberal—as in no—restrictions on abortion than most of Europe prior to the Dobbs decision. Many of the states that have passed abortion restrictions in the aftermath are now in line with European laws, though hardly anyone in Europe or here seems to know this.
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