With the new Transgender Act, the distinction between men and women will be abolished and men who consider themselves women will soon have access to women’s changing rooms and prisons without gender adjustment.
Peter Vasterman en Renate van der Zee
De Volkskrant 15 februari 2022
In their response (O&D, 8 February) to the column by Martin Sommer (Opinie, 5 February), the three representatives of COC and Transgender Netwerk Nederland, Brand Berghouwer, Astrid Oosenbrug and Philip Tijsma, slalom like Olympic descenders past almost all controversies that the new Transgender law delivers. This law makes it possible to change from man to woman or vice versa from the age of 16 with a simple signature on the town hall, and perhaps soon also in X, non-binary.
There used to be strict requirements such as operations, but since 2014 a medical statement of ‘gender dysphoria’ is sufficient: a condition in which someone suffers from the discrepancy between one’s own gender identity and his or her sex. That condition has now also expired, the only thing that matters in the new law is the ‘experienced gender identity’: whether someone ‘feels’ to be really a man or woman inside.
Although the three authors mention the concept of gender identity once, they do not explain that it is a highly personal feeling that cannot or may not be challenged any further by anyone. It also remains unmentioned that according to the gender identity theory that feeling is completely separate from the male or female body in which that feeling is located.
Nor do they say that introducing a ‘feeling’ as the basis for a legal category results in abolishing the distinction between men and women. De facto this means the end of any physical space that is now accessible only to women or men.
