America is known for promoting its values abroad through both soft and hard power.
While the actions it has taken to do so have sometimes been inadvisable, like the invasion of Iraq, America used to primarily target dictators and authoritarian regimes.
Lately, America and European Union leaders like Germany and France have taken to targeting states such as Hungary, Italy, and Poland for adopting conservative policies on immigration and being skeptical of globalist institutions.
Now, America appears ready to label countries such as Britain, Finland, and Sweden as human rights abusers for refusing to give minors gender transition surgeries.
The revelation came after a memo released by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken that classified ‘talk therapy’ as a form of LGBT conversion therapy.
Countries such as the UK, Finland, and Sweden do not allow minors to get gender transition surgeries unless they fulfill certain requirements, such as talking to a therapist.
The City Journal Reports–
[The] Blinken memo defines “conversion therapy” to include not only “electric shock” and “corrective rape” but also “talk therapy.” That’s right: using psychotherapy to help a child in distress about her changing body feel more comfortable in it rather than undergo expensive, risky, and irreversible hormonal and surgical interventions is, according to the State Department, no different from electrocuting gays and lesbians in order to “liberate” them from their innate sexual attractions.
The problem, for countries like Sweden, Finland, and the U.K., is that medical authorities in these places have concluded over the past two years that the evidence for pediatric “gender affirming care” is extremely weak and that, as a result, hormonal and surgical interventions are (as Finland’s COHERE put it) “experimental.”
Sweden and Finland are now instructing clinicians who deal with minors to utilize an approach that emphasizes talk therapy as the first line of defense and “affirming” drugs only in extreme situations, if ever. Sweden has banned gender surgeries for minors—surgeries that are practiced in the United States
