Sweden

Personal stories

This section consists of personal anecdotes from people living in Germany. Remember to take it as stories, but they can point you where you can do more research.

General experience

so i don't have much info about the cost of living etc, but i am able to share my experience of transitioning, which i believe is fairly representative

and again this is in sweden lol

the only really expedient part is changing your name – i submitted a name change request online on a saturday evening and on monday morning my online bank greeted me with my new name. the name change also only costs something like 100 kr in processing fees (though it will invalidate your ID so you need to pay for a new one)

the bad part is everything else lol

sweden does not have self id (unlike, i believe, norway and denmark), it works on an "official gender clinic" system like the uk

and they are underfunded and chronically understaffed. it is frankly an oppressive bottleneck. for whatever reason, they also force mandatory deliberate delays, on top of the many incidential delays

i have a note on my phone titled "how long it's been", i'll just paste it into a message here

message about gender dysphoria sent to gender clinic → 7 december, 2018 first meeting → 7 march, 2020 final meeting → 27 january, 2024 diagnosis (transsexualism, F64.0) → 2 february, 2024 first speech therapist meeting → 25 april, 2024 first voice training session → 11 october, 2024 first endocrinologist appointment → 13 january, 2025

as you can tell it has been over 6 years

the delay up to the first meeting is typical, i think i received a letter back that the typical wait for meeting 1 is 18 months. after that, there's a (aiui) mandatory delay of about a year until your second meeting. after that the meetings move on at a pace of around one every two months

i'll just add this bc it's important context: sweden also has only five or so gender clinics. i live in a major city and the closest one is over an hour's train ride away, located in a small town. it is very cumbersome to deal with

Ease of finding work

difficult. very many job openings demand a relevant university degree, which is pretty hard on people on the spectrum (like me, a uni dropout). i recently talked to my sister (cis) who is nearing 50 years old, and she complained to me that she is still disadvantaged by her ~20 year old degree being in a different field than her job (cont.)

Trans acceptance

great, in my experience. i have never faced obvious transphobia in the city i live in, or felt vulnerable in any context. obviously there are nazis here too, but people in general are very accepting. i have also asked business owners a few times like "hey, i'm trans, is it still om for me to get a women's haircut?" etc a couple times and i've never gotten anything other than full acceptance from them. same with doctors, i've even visited ~70 year old male doctors as a very obviously trans woman (not passing but using a female name etc) and they didn't even remark on it

Academia

no idea. all i can say is that all education is fully subsidized for swedish citizens, but non-citizens need to pay. i don't know what the cost is though. i would advise anyone unsure about it to just contact a university directly – i think the ease of admittance could vary depending on your individual situation

Language barrier

very small, virtually all swedes under the age of 80 can speak english, at least in urban areas. most are fluent – it's sort of a joke that people learning swedish can have a tough time actually getting any exposure because swedes looove an excuse to speak english. like "you sound like a native english speaker" is immensely high praise to a swede lol

Access to HRT

not great! you need to go through the system to be prescribed hrt, any doctor technically is able to but i have not met anyone willing to. again, that is a six year delay for a native swede, i can only assume it takes at least as long for a non-citizen. sweden also tightened its border checks during covid (to stop people from importing quack cures – the customs office themselves told me so), so the only way to get gray market hrt over the border is by ordering it from within the EU, which leaves fairly few choices (i've personally used one in portugal while waiting for a prescription, it cost me about $4000 in total

Contact us

If you know about life in Sweden as an LGBTQ+ person or would like to ask us questions about Sweden, you can reach out to us using the contact form.