What the curriculum actually says
Lpfö 18 and Lgr 22 are public Skolverket documents. Three key passages are reproduced verbatim below — without interpretation. Readers can judge for themselves whether the language reads as value-neutral care or as an active pedagogical mission to reshape children's understanding of sex.
The curriculum text below is Sweden's official Skolverket documents. Three key passages are reproduced verbatim — no interpretation added.
Lpfö 18 (rev. 2025) — 1. Grundläggande värden
No child in preschool shall be subjected to discrimination on the grounds of sex, gender-crossing identity or expression […] Preschool shall actively and consciously promote equal rights and opportunities regardless of gender.[1]
Source: Skolverket · Lpfö 18 (rev. 2025)Lpfö 18 (rev. 2025) — 2.1 Normer och värden
Preschool has a duty to counter gender patterns that limit children's development, choices and learning. How preschool organises education, how children are met, and the demands and expectations placed on them help shape their perceptions of what is feminine and masculine.[2]
Source: Skolverket · Lpfö 18 (rev. 2025), avsnitt 2.1Lgr 22 — 1. Skolans värdegrund och uppdrag
The school shall actively and consciously promote pupils' equal rights and opportunities regardless of gender. The school also has a duty to counter gender patterns that limit pupils' learning, choices and development.[3]
Source: Skolverket · Lgr 22
International comparison — who is applying the brakes, who is not
Australia
2025
Queensland Health 2025State-level variation: Queensland paused new hormone initiations for minors in 2025 pending review; other states retain the affirmative model.
Retains affirmative medical model
Canada
2024
Alberta Gov 2024Split picture: most provinces retain the affirmative model, while Alberta (2024) has introduced age limits for hormones and puberty blockers.
Retains affirmative medical model
Denmark
2023
Sundhedsstyrelsen 2023Danish Health Authority rewrites guidelines: most youth with gender incongruence should receive counselling, not medical transition.
Tightened medical guidelines
Finland
2020
COHERE 2020PALKO/COHERE guidelines: psychotherapy is first-line; hormones for minors only in exceptional cases.
Tightened medical guidelines
France
2022
Académie de médecine 2022Académie nationale de médecine warns of ‘great medical caution’ before early medical transition; risk of irreversible harm.
Tightened medical guidelines
Germany
2024
BMFSFJ 2024Self-Determination Act — legal gender change from age 14 (with guardian consent). The reform concerns legal gender, not medical treatment guidelines for minors.
Legal-gender reform
Netherlands
2024
Tweede Kamer 2024Amsterdam UMC pauses parts of the ‘Dutch Protocol’; parliament orders an independent review of paediatric gender services.
Tightened medical guidelines
Norway
2023
Ukom 2023Ukom (Norwegian Health Investigation) classifies affirmative treatment of minors as experimental — the evidence base is weak.
Tightened medical guidelines
Sweden
2022
Socialstyrelsen 2022 · SBU 2022National Board of Health tightens guidance: hormones for children only within research studies. SBU deems evidence insufficient.
Tightened medical guidelines
United Kingdom
2024
NHS England / Cass 2024Cass Review (388 pp.) leads to a permanent ban on puberty blockers outside clinical trials; Tavistock GIDS is closed.
Tightened medical guidelines
USA (states)
2025
SCOTUS 2025 · KFF TrackerMore than 25 states have enacted restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors. The Supreme Court upholds Tennessee's law (Skrmetti).
Tightened medical guidelines
11 of 11 rows
What the research shows
Cass Review (NHS England) 2024
A 388-page independent review. Found a weak evidence base for medical affirmation in minors and high co-occurrence — autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, documented trauma — among referred children. NHS England restricts puberty blockers to clinical trials.
Counterpoint:WPATH (Standards of Care v8, 2022) and several US specialty societies (AAP, Endocrine Society) still endorse the affirmative model and consider Cass to read the evidence too strictly. The debate is not settled internationally.
Dhejne et al. (Karolinska) 2011
Followed 324 people who underwent sex-reassignment surgery in Sweden 1973–2003. Found significantly elevated psychiatric morbidity and sharply elevated suicide risk versus a matched general-population cohort.
Counterpoint:Cecilia Dhejne herself has repeatedly noted that the study does not compare operated with non-operated trans people and therefore says nothing about whether surgery itself raises or lowers the risk. The paper is regularly cited in debate in ways she has explicitly rejected.
Littman 2018 — Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria
Parent-reported teenage clusters (mostly girls) identifying as trans after intense social-media and peer-group exposure, without prior signs of gender dysphoria.
Counterpoint:The study draws on a self-selected parent sample from trans-sceptic forums and is methodologically hypothesis-generating, not epidemiological. Brown University distanced itself from the original version and the journal published a corrected version in 2019.
Desistance research
Older prospective studies — including those the Dutch Protocol was built on — show that a majority of children with gender dysphoria naturally reconcile with their biological sex through puberty if no medical intervention is given. Most turn out to be gay young adults.
Counterpoint:Critics (Olson-Kennedy and others) argue that several of these studies used a broader DSM-IV definition of ‘gender identity disorder’ that included children who were never trans in the modern sense. Transferability to today's adolescents with clear gender dysphoria is disputed.
Detransitioners and litigation
A growing group of people who regret transition. Keira Bell (UK, 2020) and Chloe Cole (USA) have brought high-profile lawsuits against clinics that affirmed them as children.
Counterpoint:Recent meta-analyses (Bustos et al. 2021) estimate regret after surgical transition at ≈ 1 %. Detransition rates among minors treated today are harder to measure — data are still lacking.
‘Dragons and drag queens’ — story hours and the curriculum
What Swedish public debate sometimes calls ”drakar och dragqueens” — story hours for children hosted by drag performers in libraries and preschools — is an imported practice. The Drag Queen Story Hour concept (now Drag Story Hour) was launched by author Michelle Tea in San Francisco in 2015.
In Sweden individual libraries (including Stockholm City Library and Malmö libraries) have hosted similar events since the late 2010s. RFSL's LGBTQI certification of preschools and schools has spread in parallel, and material such as Regnbågsungar is used in pedagogical work. The Södermalm preschool Egalia was, in 2010, an early precursor of ”gender-neutral” pedagogy.
The difference between a library story hour (municipal cultural programming that a parent opts into) and the preschool's curriculum mandate (compulsory for every child from age one) matters. Criticism is directed almost exclusively at the latter — at a theoretical position (queer and gender theory) being written into a binding steering document without active parental consent.
2035
The curriculum's anti-discrimination rule and healthcare treatment guidelines regulate different things. The question is whether Sweden — where Lpfö 18 is unchanged — will revise the wording or keep it as more countries reappraise the medical model.
If further countries follow the UK's Cass line on the medical side, Sweden's pedagogical steering documents keep diverging from several neighbours' healthcare guidance — two separate systems that are sometimes conflated in the debate.
Sources for this page
The data comes from official primary sources.
Socialstyrelsen · Irregular
Socialstyrelsens nationella kunskapsstöd — vård av barn och ungdomar med könsdysforiNationellt kunskapsstöd om könsdysfori hos barn och unga
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