Forced Sterilization in Sweden — An Outrage
Photo: Sweden’s Queen Christina (1626-1689)
Copyright 2012 by Dallas Denny
Forced Sterilization in Sweden: An Outrage
As I sat down to begin this column an e-mail came in from my friend, Dr. Sandra Cole. Had I seen this blogpost by Christin Molloy?
No, I hadn’t. I was shocked. Canada, after all, is generally considered to be a far more liberal and reasonable country than the U.S.
Christin’s post went up on January 30th and is already on the GLBT pages at Huffington Post. I expect Canadian activists to raise hell, and hope they do!
But what I intend to write about is Sweden’s governmental requirement that anyone who changes their gender must be sterilized.
Sterilized! Surgically rendered infertile! What!?
The Scandinavian countries in general and Sweden in particular are generally considered the most liberal on the planet, second only to the adjacent Netherlands. Sweden, however, has a long history of forced sterilization; from the time the Sterilization Act of 1934 was passed until its repeal in 1975, more than 62,000 people were sterilized. Of those, some 30,000 were coerced or forced to submit to medical procedures. [1] Most were women.
In 1999 the government began paying compensation to those who had been forcibly sterilized.
Several months ago I learned Sweden was requiring transsexual men and women to be sterilized in order to obtain medical treatment. I was, of course, horrified–but I wasn’t particularly surprised. That’s because, back in 2001, Jan Wickman gave me a copy of her book Transgender Politics, in which she discussed the slow acceptance of the healthy transgender model by transsexual and transgendered people in Finland. Finland, it seemed, had a government board that regulated sex reassignment much as did the gender clinics of the United States prior to 1979–and so did Sweden.
In the United States, from 1965 or so until 1979, gender clinics, operating under a mental illness model of transsexualism, strictly controlled access to medical treatments like hormonal therapy and genital surgery, requiring applicants to conform to gender stereotypes and more often than not rejecting them as unsuitable.
The clinics suddenly disappeared following a fraudulent follow-up 1979 study by Jon Meyer and Donna Reter, which alleged “no objective advantage” to surgical sex reassignment for male-to-female transsexuals. Orchestrated by psychiatrist Paul McHugh, who managed to get the story into almost every magazine and newspaper in the world, the U.S. clinics closed. But in Sweden, they stayed open.
The medical model holds that transsexual people are mentally ill and justified hormonal and surgical treatment only on palliative grounds, to alleviate suffering because there is no “cure.” In the United States this has been and is being replaced by a healthy transgender model focused on diversity of gender expression–the individual rather than a team of physicians determines how he or she will live.
Apparently this new model hasn’t percolated through to the Swedish government. Consequently, although sex reassignment has been legal in Sweden since 1972, the government requires applicants to get divorced (if married) and to under sterilization procedures.
Requests for a change in the law have been stonewalled by the government. Thankfully, Sweden is now in the hot seat because of its unnecessary draconian requirements.
This report makes it clear Sweden is decades behind in transgender treatment. Transsexuals are viewed as mentally ill and manipulated and controlled, with access to medical treatment held out as a distant carrot (for instance, there’s a 12-month waiting period for initiation of hormonal therapy). The focus is on diagnosis rather than on treatment. And the stick? Unless transsexuals submit to this abuse, they aren’t allowed to change their gender on legal documents.
This is outrageous behavior from a country that once had a transgendered (and possibly transsexual) queen!
Sweden is destroying the lives of transsexual people. Please express your indignation by writing or phoning Sweden’s Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfield and other Swedish officials:
Notes
[1] Sweden, like the United States, Germany, and many other countries, was swept up in the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. See Gould, below, for a fascinating history of the movement’s influence on mental measurement.
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Sweden
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization#Sweden
http://www.notdeadyet.org/eughis.html
http://www.windweaver.com/christina/intro.htm
Denny, Dallas. (1992). The politics of diagnosis and a diagnosis of politics: The university-affiliated gender clinics, and how they failed to meet the needs of transsexual people. Chrysalis Quarterly, 1(3), 17-27.
Gould, Stephen J. (1981). The mismeasure of man. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Meyer, Jon, & Reter, Donna. (1979). Sex reassignment: Follow-up. Archives of General Psychiatry, 36(9), 1010-1015.
Ogas, Ogi. (1994, 9 March). Spare parts: new information reignites a controversy surrounding the Hopkins gender identicy clinic. City Paper (Baltimore), 18(10), cover, 10-15.
Wickman, Jan. (2001). Transgender politics: The construction and deconstruction of binary gender in the Finnisyh transgender community. Abo, Finland: Abo Akademi University Press.
Category: Transgender Community News, Transgender Opinion
About the Author (Author Profile)
Dallas Denny’s contributions to transgender activism, knowledge, and history are legendary and span four decades. She was the first voice thousands of desperate transpeople heard when they reached out for help, and she provided the information and referrals they so desperately needed. She is a prolific writer. Her books, booklets, magazines she has edited, and articles fill an entire bookcase and are in danger of spilling over into a second bookcase. She has created and led several national nonprofit organizations, been present at the creation of at least five transgender conferences, and led two long-lived support groups, She created the first trans-exclusive archive of printed and recorded literature, which today is available to the public at Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan. She has been a fierce advocate for transgender autonomy and access to medical care. Through it all, she has stayed on task, and made it all about the task at hand rather than about herself. Now, in her mid-seventies, she maintains the same frenetic pace she has kept up since the 1980s. Dallas’ work is viewable in its entirety on her website.Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
