During the last year left-leaning media have given ample coverage to gender-affirming care and puberty blockers, before and after President Biden stated "Affirming a transgender child’s identity is one of the best things that a parent, teacher, or doctor can do to keep children from harm".  Since keeping children from harm is the objective, it would stand to reason to also consider the experience of countries that embraced gender-affirming care early, like Sweden. In the last year, two major changes occurred there.

First, in May 2021, a new policy ended the practice of prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors with gender dysphoria at Karolinska's pediatric gender services at Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital (ALB), in Stockholm and other facilities.

Then, in February 2022, the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW) issued an update to its health care service guidelines for minors with gender dysphoria/gender incongruence, based on a systematic review of evidence. In it you can read:

"The NBHW deems that the risks of puberty suppressing treatment with GnRH-analogues and gender-affirming hormonal treatment currently outweigh the possible benefits, and that the treatments should be offered only in exceptional cases. This judgment is based mainly on three factors: the continued lack of reliable scientific evidence concerning the efficacy and the safety of both treatments, the new knowledge that detransition occurs among young adults, and the uncertainty that follows from the yet unexplained increase in the number of care seekers."

You would expect left-leaning media to report such a radical change in approach, even if just to criticize progressive Sweden, a country by the way that in 1972 was the first in the world to introduce a law regulating access to legal and genital gender reassignment (SFS, 1772:119).

So we checked to see how many articles in the last year covered the topic of puberty blockers and gender-affirming care, and how many of those mentioned Sweden or the Karolinska hospital. Click on Show data to see the results.