Waiting five years for the first appointment: the reality of the Dutch gender care waiting list

Anyone who registers for transgender care in the Netherlands is not waiting a few weeks but years for their first appointment. At VU Amsterdam, the wait for adults is at least five years, at UMC Groningen more than three years, and at Radboudumc four years. And that is only the wait until the intake — after that, there is an average additional wait of thirteen months for a first appointment with a psychologist, according to figures released by patient organisation Transvisie in 2025. For those in this phase of their lives, care providers say these are "years of life slipping away" while nothing happens. Current waiting-time information from Amsterdam UMC is available at genderzorgnederland.nl.

The main article on this subject is Waiting times and care pathway.

More money, more people waiting

Since 2018, a government-appointed "Transgender Care Coordinator" has been working to reduce these waiting lists. On paper, substantial investment has been made: psychological care capacity for minors grew by 123 percent, and for adults by as much as 483 percent. Yet the waiting list continues to grow because demand is increasing faster than supply. In 2021, the amount of care actually delivered increased by 15 percent, while demand rose by 63 percent in the same year. The background is explained in explosive growth in registrations. Every additional treatment place becomes available is soon absorbed by new registrations — a pattern in which expanding capacity does not, by itself, shorten the waiting list, because more accessible care simultaneously lowers the threshold for registering.

What is at stake

Research by COC Nederland and the University of Groningen in 2024 shows that transgender people are three to four times more likely to experience suicidal thoughts than their cisgender peers. The same line of research also shows that these thoughts become less frequent once someone actually enters care — making the waiting time itself a factor in the risk, separate from how one may otherwise view the treatment. At the same time, this argument cuts both ways: above all, it underlines how heavily the system relies on timely, careful diagnosis, something an overloaded waiting list inherently leaves little room for.

Who does get help quickly

The waiting-list figures conceal an inequality that receives less attention in the news. People with stronger social networks and greater financial resources find it easier to access private providers, which also have waiting times but generally shorter ones than the academic centres. For example, in October 2026, the provider Genderhealthcare reported a waiting time of 491 days, described on genderzorgen.nl. Those without the means remain dependent on the public system and therefore face the longest waiting lists. A crisis that formally affects everyone equally therefore works selectively in practice: the very group without an alternative waits the longest for an initial assessment.

A problem that requires more than money

The fact that years of investment have not solved the waiting-list problem raises a question that goes beyond capacity alone: whether the current model — in which every indication of gender incongruence or gender dysphoria enters the same narrow channel of specialised gender clinics — is in fact the most effective approach. Countries that have placed the initial diagnostic step closer to the GP or mainstream mental healthcare show that distributing registrations can relieve some of the pressure. As long as the Netherlands maintains a single narrow access point for a growing group of applicants, the waiting list will presumably continue to grow with every expansion of supply.