New report says transgender law caused “profound” suffering

The law governing how transgender people could change their legal gender had profound physical, psychological, and social consequences, according to a report by Radboud University released on Thursday.

Researchers conducted 28 in-depth interviews with trans and intersex people, as and studied Health Council and parliamentary papers to reach the conclusions found in the report, titled An Inhuman Law.

The report, commissioned by the education ministry, “examines how the law ​​and its conditions impacted the lives of trans and intersex people, as well as the forms of harm, coercion, and loss of autonomy they experienced”.

From 1985 to 2014, trans people had to meet a series of criteria to change their legal gender. Until 2001, they had to be unmarried, so some were forced to divorce their partners.

They also had to undergo physical adaptation “as far as medically or psychologically justified” and be permanently infertile, which meant having the uterus and ovaries or the testicles removed.

Some 2,000 people are thought to have been affected by it, the Volkskrant reported on Thursday.

“You have to negotiate with society, with doctors, and with God knows who.
And you no longer have time for yourself,” one trans woman who participated in the study said.

Junior education minister Judith Tielen said the report “helps us learn from what happened at the time”.

The bill was controversial when it was proposed in 1982. The CDA felt that without requiring physical changes, it would be too easy to change genders, which would also allow gay couples to marry and for men to avoid conscription. But D66 and PSP (which would eventually become GroenLinks and then Pro) were opposed to any surgical or medical requirements.

In 2021, the government apologised to all transgender people who were forced to accept being sterilised and to undergo body modification and take hormones if they wanted to change their gender on official documents.

The apology followed legal action by the Transgender Collective in 2019, which said that the law conflicted with the European Convention on Human Rights. In 2011, the Dutch law was also the subject of a damning report by Human Rights Watch.