The Conversion Law Means the End of Gender Transition

The critical dossier on the conversion law is available at conversiewet.nl.

The main article on this subject is Ban on conversion therapy.

Essay by Edward Jansen

The new conversion law seeks to regulate one thing: no one may induce another person to adopt a different sexual orientation or gender identity from their own. The legislature calls such attempts harmful, irreversible in their consequences, and therefore punishable. That sounds carefully considered. But anyone who reads the law as it is written will see something its sponsors themselves do not seem to want to acknowledge: the very same text that protects gay people from being turned straight also incidentally bans gender transition in its entirety.

The law, taken literally

The law refers to acts intended to change someone’s sexual orientation or identity. That includes the church-based programs of the past. It includes the “talking circuit.” But it equally includes any medical pathway intended to enable a girl to live as a boy or a boy to live as a girl. For what is a puberty blocker other than stopping the identity the body is in the process of becoming? What are cross-sex hormones other than actively pushing that identity toward the opposite sex? What is a mastectomy on a healthy sixteen-year-old girl’s body other than the most definitive conversion procedure known to medicine?

The legislature wanted to protect gay people from pastors. Using the same words, it protects children from endocrinologists.

Two things cannot both be true

The current defense is that medical transition is not conversion, because the body is adapted to the internal identity, rather than the other way around. That sounds conclusive until you ask the next question. Who decides which of the two—the body or the feelings—represents the true identity? The law now before us has already answered that question. It states that a person’s sexual orientation and identity cannot be redirected through pressure, conversation, or treatment. Anyone who accepts that premise cannot simultaneously maintain that the body of a fourteen-year-old can be on the “wrong” side and may be brought “into alignment” with blockers and hormones. Either identity is fixed and inviolable—in which case every medical intervention is unnecessary and harmful. Or identity is malleable—in which case the entire rationale for the conversion law collapses.

Two things cannot both be true. The law chooses, whether it intends to or not.

Who is really being converted

Among the young people now coming forward for treatment, a disproportionately large share are homosexual; see the article on gay and lesbian young people in the gender debate. Girls who are attracted to girls. Boys who are attracted to boys. Without treatment, they would grow up to be lesbian women and gay men. With treatment, their breasts are removed, their voices lowered, their wombs removed, their penises reconstructed—and at the end of that journey they are called heterosexual men and heterosexual women. That is not a linguistic invention of mine. That is what happens.

The pastor who once tried to get a lesbian girl to pray her way into becoming a heterosexual woman was essentially doing the same thing as the counselor who now guides that same girl toward testosterone, facial hair, and men’s clothing. The endpoint is identical: a woman attracted to women is made heterosexual on paper. The pastor failed because his means were weak. The counselor succeeds because the means are irreversible. That does not make the counselor more innocent. It makes the counselor more dangerous.

What the law sets in motion once passed

Once the conversion law is in place, a lawyer acting on behalf of a detransitioner can argue that her doctors, school, counselors, and online environment pressured her to reject her body and her sexual orientation. She arrives with scars and medical records. The law says that is a criminal offense. A court will not be able to explain why the same set of facts falls under the law in a gay-to-straight pathway but not in a lesbian-girl-to-trans-man pathway. The reasoning will not hold once it is spoken aloud in a courtroom.

The first judgments will follow. The WPATH guideline will have to give way. Gender transition as we have seen it grow over the past fifteen years—as a roadmap, a care pathway, and a product for young people—will not be able to continue in its current form.

In conclusion

I do not think this is what the sponsors had in mind. They wanted to make a gesture toward one group and did not understand what was attached to it for the other. But laws do not operate on intentions; they operate on text. And the text before us, read honestly, closes the gates on transition care. Not through a top-down prohibition, but through the very logic the legislature itself has written into the law.

The conversion law protects gay people from pastors. Whether it intends to or not, it also protects children from surgeons. If we truly mean what we say, there is no escaping that conclusion.