Yes, Europe Is Restricting Gender-Affirming Care | City Journal
A common claim by Americans who oppose state restrictions on gender-affirming care is that Sweden, Finland, and the U.K. have not done away with hormonal interventions and therefore that Republican lawmakers who seek such restrictions are going beyond Europe, and presumably against what European health authorities recommend. Jack Turban, a prominent voice in the affirmative-medicine movement and a notorious source of misinformation on this issue, has said that not a single country in Europe has banned gender-affirming care for trans youth. The claim is true in a narrow and technical sense, but highly misleading.
In the past few years, European health authorities conducted systematic reviews of evidence for the benefits and risks of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. The findings from these reviews that the certainty of benefits is very low guided the hand of policymakers there to restrict access to hormones. Currently, minors in these countries can access puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones only if they meet strict eligibility requirements as set out in the Dutch protocol and only in the context of a tightly controlled research setting.
As I ve explained in past writings, the research from the Dutch clinics is championed even by American proponents of affirmative medicine as the gold standard in pediatric gender medicine. These advocates either don t know or are deliberately misleading the public about the discrepancy between the Dutch protocol and what is actually happening in American clinics. The American approach effectively puts distressed teenagers in the driver s seat of making risky and irreversible medical decisions. It assumes that gender identity is innate and immutable, that some kids are just born trans and can know this from as young as toddlerhood. It also uses the minority stress model to explain away co-occurring mental-health problems, which appear in roughly three-quarters of patients presenting at pediatric gender clinics.