The national conservative Sweden Democrats party has pledged to repeal the country’s new controversial ‘Gender Affiliation Act’ that came into effect on Tuesday, July 1st, proposing a three-step plan instead to fix the “madness” of ‘trans-affirming’ medical procedures exploiting minors if elected next year.
The new law allows minors to change their legal gender from the age of 16—as long as their adult guardian consents—and makes it easier for individuals identifying as transgender to get sex-change surgery without the need for a ‘gender dysphoria’ diagnosis or the permission of the National Board of Health and Welfare.
The law was approved in the Swedish parliament in April 2024 by a broad coalition of six parties from far-left to center-right, with only the national conservative Sweden Democrats (SD) and the smaller Christian Democrats (KD) voting against it.
As we wrote earlier, Sweden Democrat MP Richard Jomshof described the change as “madness, insanity, and folly,” while journalist Anders Gustafsson joked that it would soon be “easier to change your legal gender than to buy a bottle of wine during a vineyard visit” in Sweden.
And while the parliament adopted the bill with 234 votes in favor and only 94 against, public opinion seems to reflect the exact opposite ratio among regular Swedes. A poll conducted around the time found that 59% percent viewed it negatively, while only 22% supported it; the rest were undecided or afraid to state their opinion.
To mark its implementation, three SD lawmakers—Jessica Stegrud, Carita Boulwén, and Leonid Yurkovskiy—wrote an opinion piece in Svenska Dagbladet, criticizing the legislation as both “ill-conceived and harmful” to minors, and pledging to repeal it in the next parliamentary term if their party gets elected to the government in September 2026.
In the article, the MPs argue that the new law removes crucial medical safeguards and risks pushing vulnerable minors toward making life-altering decisions that they will come to regret later.
These teenagers often confuse ‘normal’ psychological conditions (such as anxiety or depression) with gender dysphoria, they write, and while a significant number of gender identity issues automatically resolve after puberty, the effects of hormone therapy and sex-change surgery cannot be reversed.
To underline this point, the MPs recalled cases when teenagers, typically girls, underwent irreversible procedures such as mastectomy, only to later change their minds as adults when they realized that transitioning only worsened their mental health issues.
Therefore, the Sweden Democrats laid down three concrete proposals in response that they would enact once in government, the first of which is to immediately repeal the gender identity law.
Second, the party would abolish what they describe as gender education in preschools—the practice of actively encouraging children to play with the toys or dress in the clothes of the opposite sex to challenge traditional gender roles. The MPs said this only confuses children, and preschool teachers should not be allowed to influence how kids express themselves.
And finally, they proposed compensation for people who underwent sex change as minors and later came to regret it, saying that the state has a responsibility to those who were harmed by medical decisions they made at the advice of doctors or psychologists before they could fully decide for themselves.
At the same time, the party also calls for an independent review of medical providers involved in ‘transition’ procedures to determine whether young people have been properly screened for basic mental health issues and if they were informed of the irreversible effects before undergoing treatment.
Unless they get the same treatment as other national conservative parties around Europe—and get locked out of governance even at the price of the center-right having to join with the Left—the Sweden Democrats do have a solid chance of joining the next coalition.
They currently poll at 19%, one point above PM Ulf Kristerson’s center-right Moderates, which leads a three-party minority coalition, supported by SD from the outside. However, the Sweden Democrats stated that they won’t enter into another confidence-and-supply agreement, so unless the Moderates and the Liberals want the Social Democrats to come back, they will have to give the conservatives a proper place in the cabinet.