As the American medical establishment, the Biden administration, and blue states go all-in for puberty blocking, teenage mastectomies, and other forms of so-called gender-affirming care, Western European countries are running in the other direction as fast as a bullet train.
Now, that Bible Belt country — Denmark — can be added to the list. From the story published by the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (my emphasis):
The Journal of the Danish Medical Association confirmed that there has been a marked shift in the country’s approach to caring for youth with gender dysphoria. 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.
This is the very caring approach denigrated as “transphobic” by the usual gender ideologues.
More:
As the number of young people wishing to undergo gender reassignment increased, so did the rates at which Danish gender clinicians transitioned them. By 2018, Denmark’s centralized gender service was medically transitioning 65% of referred youth. . . . However, following systematic reviews of evidence conducted in Europe and the subsequent reversal of the “gender-affirmation” paradigm in favor of a cautious, developmentally-informed approach that prioritizes psychosocial support and noninvasive resolution of gender distress in Sweden and Finland, Denmark appears to have made a quiet but resolute shift to treat most youth presenting with gender dysphoria with supportive counseling rather than puberty blockers, hormones, or surgery. In 2022, only 6% of those referred to Denmark’s centralized gender clinic were prescribed endocrine interventions (puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones).
From 60 percent to 6 percent! Why?
The rationale for this shift was explained in a recent publication in Ugeskrift for Læger (“Weekly Journal for Physicians”), the Journal of the Danish Medical Association. This Danish-language article provides one of the most sober discussions to date of the inherent medical and ethical uncertainties of providing minors with profound, life-altering interventions in the context of very limited understanding of the epidemiological shift in the population presenting for care, the growing rates of detransition, and the profound uncertainty about long-term outcomes.
In other words, something smelled rotten in Demark.
So, America, what will it be? Evidence-based medicine to treat gender-dysphoric children as is proliferating in Western Europe? Or ideologically based policies of all affirmation all the time epitomized by the advocacy of the American Academy of Pediatrics, WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health), and the odious advocacy of the HHS assistant secretary, Admiral Rachel Levine?
For the sake of our vulnerable children, we had better hope we follow Europe for a change.