Via Alpha News
For years, liberal Minnesota politicians have viewed Scandinavian countries as the lodestar of progressive thinking. How ironic then, that Democrats here have declared Minnesota a “trans refuge” state, just as Sweden, Finland and other Nordic countries are rejecting America’s medicalized “gender-affirming care” model as risky and non-evidence-based.
Minnesota’s new “trans refuge” law — enacted in April 2023 with great fanfare — is designed to ensure that puberty-blockers, synthetic cross-sex hormone treatments and “gender-affirming” surgery are widely available to young people who want them. The law shields minors who come here for this purpose from legal consequences in their home states.
Democrats insist this law will significantly reduce the risk of suicide, anxiety and depression, and is vital to the well-being of young people with gender distress. Rep. Leigh Finke, the legislation’s sponsor, has labeled the approach, which irreversibly alters young people’s bodies, as “life-saving.” Gov. Tim Walz has accused states that are restricting it of “bigotry and hate.” In Minnesota, he says, “compassion is on the march.”
If this is so, why are Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the United Kingdom and other nations —once on the cutting edge of this medicalized approach — now publicly rejecting it in favor of a holistic focus on psychotherapy and counseling? The “gender-affirming” model, which relies on “off-label” drugs the FDA never approved for this purpose, was widely adopted beginning about 2008 without rigorous clinical trials to establish its effectiveness. Starting in 2019, a variety of troubling factors led some European nations to rethink it. These included an extraordinary, unexplained escalation in the number of gender-distressed young women — a 4,400 percent increase over 10 years in England, for example.
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