Sweden's U-Turn on Transitioning Kids - The Documentaries - The Trans Train Part 3

In part 3 there is a brief update about Alexsa Lundberg, a famous transwoman in Sweden who was profiled in the second Trans Train episode. She makes the difficult disclosure that if she had it to do all over again, in light of the new evidence about risks and outcomes, she would likely not have chosen to undergo sex reassignment surgery and would have, instead, chosen to live life as a feminine gay man.

On the political front, the government order a new review of the evidence basis for transition surgery of minor after the findings of the first two Trans Train episodes. The result is that the health ministry now opposes sex reassignment surgery for minors as there is insufficient evidence to justify endorsing the intervention.

There remain questions about puberty blockers and cross sex hormones and the public discourse about detransitioners and regretters continues to evolve.

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In May of 2021 Sweden announced a change of their policy regarding the medical and surgical transition of children. The change came in the wake of several bombshell documentaries which explored the issue of medicalization of children experiencing gender dysphoria in Sweden and Europe.

The controversial documentary series examined the evidence base of the protocols, the ethics of treating children who cannot consent and the degree of oversight and accountability that clinics held for their patients.

The english speaking world isn't aware of much of what the documentaries uncovered because of the language barrier, as the films are mostly in Swedish. English captions have been made available and for the first time the films are presented here with english voiceover to make them more accessible.

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This transition protocol for children based on "The Dutch Study" had previously been used by clinics in Sweden since around 2014 to start children on puberty blockers leading to cross-sex hormones and surgery.

The "Dutch Study" was originally designed with strict criteria for inclusion which were not being applied to the exploding population of mostly young women who were starting to seek treatment for dysphoria. As such, most patients being put on this "trans train" of affirmation and medicalization were a different population group than those studied in the original Dutch protocol.

As a result, the issues of regret and detransition began to be come more common as people for whom the Dutch Protocol was not designed for started to see that medical and surgical transition did not solve their issues.

When these stories started to leak out, the Swedish investigative journalists at "Mission: Investigate" started talking with regretters and detransitioners and approached the hospitals and clinics who were treating young people at the time to figure out what was going on.

Over the next several years subsequent episodes of Mission: Investigate explored other aspects of the modern discourse about the medical treatment of gender dysphoria. The revelations of this series were eventually led to the national health system in Sweden reviewing their protocols and issuing an official policy halting the implementation of the Dutch protocol in treating children with gender dysphoria.