Malcom Kyeyune

Why did Swedish conservatives relax gender-change laws?

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson (Getty Images)

In the 2010s the main political dynamic inside western societies could be boiled down to simple left and right. Figures such as Jordan Peterson, and others loosely grouped under the banner of the ‘intellectual dark web’, were only just rising to prominence and had begun to discuss the new-fangled idea of the ‘culture wars’. 

These days conservatives are just phoning it in, going through the motions, and collecting their paychecks for as long as they can

Today, the battle between progressives and conservatives has been replaced by something far more confusing and unsettling. The recent legislative debacle in Sweden, in which a right-wing government – a government that conservatives cheered as Sweden’s first truly conservative government in a generation – pushed through a law to make it easier for a young person to change their legal gender and access life-altering surgery, is a case in point. It’ll mean that young people can change gender aged 16, rather than 18.

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