Lukas Romson, one of the country's leading trans activists, is prepared for the worst. "There will be no serious trans activists in the show, because none of us trusts Malou at all," he says. "I'm afraid she'll just use us."
But the fact that a mainstream programme is devoting so much time to the issue demonstrates just how much the debate has shifted in Sweden over the past year. "It's been a very big change and very sudden," Romson adds. "Everyone - but especially young people - feels worse because of what they perceive as the media's hatred of them."
The immediate trigger for Von Sivers's themed week is a report from Sweden's Board of Health and Welfare which confirmed a 1,500% rise between 2008 and 2018 in gender dysphoria diagnoses among 13- to 17-year-olds born as girls.
Comment: Clearly there is more going on here than just a bunch of kids "realizing" they are the wrong gender. It's a social contagion. See the following, and the links in the comment there:
But it also reflects a rapid change in public opinion. Just a year ago, there seemed few official obstacles left in the way of young people who wanted gender reassignment treatment.
In the autumn of 2018, the Social Democrat-led government, under pressure from the gay, lesbian and transgender group RFSL, proposed a new law which would reduce the minimum age for sex reassignment medical care from 18 to 15, remove all need for parental consent, and allow children as young as 12 to change their legal gender.
Then in March last year, the backlash started. Christopher Gillberg, a psychiatrist at Gothenburg's Sahlgrenska Academy, wrote an article in the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper warning that hormone treatment and surgery on children was "a big experiment" which risked becoming one of the country's worst medical scandals.
In April, Uppdrag Granskning, an investigative TV programme, followed up with a documentary profiling a former trans man, Sametti, who regretted her irreversible treatment.
In October, the programme turned its fire on the team at Stockholm's Karolinska University hospital, which specialises in treating minors with gender dysphoria. The unit has been criticised for carrying out double mastectomies on children as young as 14, and accused of rushing through treatment and failing to consider adequately whether patients' other psychiatric or developmental issues might better explain their unhappiness with their bodies. The Karolinska disputed the claim, saying it carefully assessed each case.
At the same time, Filter magazine profiled the case of Jennifer Ring, a 32-year-old trans woman who hanged herself four years after her surgery. An expert on psychosis who was shown her medical journal by her father, Avi Ring, was quoted as saying that she had shown clear signs of psychosis at the time she first sought treatment for gender dysphoria.
Indeed, the first clinic she approached refused to treat her, citing signs of schizotypal symptoms and lack of a history of gender dysphoria. But the team at Karolinska went ahead. "Karolinska don't stop anyone; virtually 100% get sex reassignment," says Ring.
Sweden's authorities are starting to respond. Shortly before the bill that would have lowered the sex reassignment minimum age was due to be debated in parliament in September, it was shelved, and the Board of Health and Welfare was ordered to reassess the evidence. Its report is due on 31 March.
After being interviewed on Uppdrag Granskning, Sweden's health minister, Lena Hallengren, asked the programme to include a text addendum to remind viewers that it had been her predecessor, and not her, who had drafted the controversial law.
On 20 December, the Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment, which the government had asked to review the scientific research into the recent surge in teenagers reporting gender dysphoria, reported that there was very little research either into the reason for the increase or the risks or benefits of hormone treatment and surgery.
For Romson this is a worrying turn of events. He blames Gender Identity Challenge Scandinavia (Genid), a parents' group set up by Ring, a retired professor of neurophysiology, the Swedish toxicologist Karin Svens and the Norwegian teacher Marit Rønstad, for the change in the debate, contrasting these "so-called concerned parents" with "real parents" who affirm their children's chosen identities.
Comment: Real parents don't allow their children to make body- and life-altering decisions before their brains are fully formed.
Svens was the only Swedish parent to speak openly on Uppdrag Granskning about how her trans son announced he was a boy when he was 17, started going to Karolinska's adult clinic when he turned 18, and now identifies as male. When asked about Jennifer Ring, he says that friends of hers have told him she found it difficult that her family were unwilling to accept her as a trans woman.
"When I started questioning this some years ago, I thought I was alone," says Svens. "They tried to scare me by repeatedly implying that there is a high risk of suicide, especially if the parents don't agree. Now more and more parents have found the courage to question what the doctors say."
The recent report from the Board of Health and Welfare also found that 32.4 percent of 13 to 17-year-olds with gender dysphoria registered at birth as women also had diagnoses for anxiety disorder, 28.9 percent had depression, 19.4 percent had ADHD, and 15.2 percent had autism.
Trans people often explain the higher levels of depression and anxiety by pointing to the difficult experience living in a body that clashes with their gender identity, particularly when many in society, often including parents and friends, do not accept their identity.
One of the most surprising changes has been the growing divisions between trans activists. While Romson warns that children will have even more anxiety because of the change in the debate, Aleksa Lundberg, a trans woman and longstanding activist, is backing the call for more research.
Last October she apologised for not having been sufficiently open about the depression she had felt after her operation. "I would probably not undergo corrective surgery if I had the same choice today," she wrote. "And I want to apologise to those who perhaps needed to hear that story earlier."
At one time both my husband and I started having hot flashes for no reason that we could see because nothing had changed in our life. This went on for a number of months and then we read an article about some kind of medicine or a vaccine which could stop hot flashes. Were they intentionally creating a problem through thought projection, hoping to sell their pharma crap??
We know from experience they can cause you to have lots of mucus, to make you hurt anywhere in your body, to make you paranoid as if someone was going to attack you, or to make you an emotional wreck so you go get drugs for depression. Perhaps flu-like symptoms are also being projected and everyone is freaking out because they think it is coronavirus. I wouldn't put anything past the traitor maggots!