Vasterman: radical feminists see Gender Recognition Act as a threat to women

Peter Vasterman points to Menno Sedee’s piece in NRC, in which gender-critical feminists — dismissed as “radical” by supporters of the Gender Recognition Act — explain why self-identification undermines hard-won women’s spaces.

The fault line that can no longer be hidden

On 11 September 2022, NRC Handelsblad published a report by Menno Sedee on the group of feminists opposing the proposed amendment to the Gender Recognition Act. Vasterman picked up the piece because, for the first time in the Dutch quality press, it gave a voice to a group that had been pushed to the margins for years: women who refuse to accept the legal removal of the sex boundary. The Rutte IV government wants to amend the law so that going to court and obtaining an expert’s certificate would no longer be required. A signature at the municipal office would then be enough to officially change sex. “With an amendment to the law, it will become easier to officially change sex,” Sedee and Vasterman summarise the essence of the proposal. The bill was withdrawn in 2025; see the withdrawn self-identification bill.

“The greatest threat to women of all”

The feminists speaking in the NRC article are not insignificant. They include lawyers, former women’s shelter directors, sports coaches and historians who have built their positions on solid foundations. Their analysis, as presented by NRC: “Gender-critical feminists see this as the greatest threat to women of all.” Not rhetorical exaggeration for effect, but a substantiated claim. If sex becomes solely a matter of self-identification, the legal category of “woman” as a protected group disappears. Quotas, statistics, health research, shelters for abused women, women’s sports, women’s prisons, targeted policy — everything the second wave of feminism won over eighty years rests on a measurably defined category. Open that category to self-declaration, and the foundation collapses.

One rights struggle overriding another

The NRC article also gives voice to the opposing view: the amendment is happening “to the fury of the transgender movement.” Not because trans organisations oppose simplification — they actively want it — but because they dismiss every question about conflicting rights as transphobia. Vasterman points out that this is precisely the mechanism that has led to court cases, clinic closures and political disasters in other Western countries: a rights framework that presents itself as a pure expansion of freedom, while in practice restricting the rights of another group — biological women. The NRC piece lays out this conflict sharply for the first time in an established Dutch medium.

What the amendment actually does

The current Gender Recognition Act (in force since 2014) requires an expert’s certificate from a psychologist or doctor. The amendment removes that requirement. In his other analyses, Vasterman points out that the evaluation on which this removal is based is methodologically weak — three psychologists interviewed, four surveys with unclear samples, and one survey with nine participants. Parliament is advised to remove, on this basis, a threshold that works in practice: nearly three-quarters of municipal officials consider the certificate a barrier against fraud and hasty changes. What remains once the certificate is removed: an open self-identification system that, in every country where it has been introduced, has led to legal disputes over women’s spaces within five years.

Why this is not “a minor bill”

For years, the Dutch political establishment presented the amendment as a technical refinement. According to Vasterman, the fact that it only became publicly controversial in 2022 is a symptom of the Dutch media’s blind spot on this issue. In the United Kingdom, a comparable proposal — the reform of Scotland’s Gender Recognition Act — led to a political crisis, Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation, and ultimately intervention by Westminster. In Spain, a major shift in women’s crime statistics followed after the self-ID law came into effect. In the English-speaking world, women who point to these consequences — J.K. Rowling being the best-known example — are systematically demonised. The same dynamic threatens to emerge in the Netherlands.

The “radical” label

One of the sharpest signals in the NRC piece is the framing itself. Women who point to concrete consequences for women’s spaces are not described as concerned, critical or legally knowledgeable. They are labelled “radical” — a designation that for years was associated with terrorism, extremism and irrationality. Vasterman argues that this has become the standard media frame for women who challenge the self-identification doctrine. The language is not a detail: it determines whether a reader perceives the voice as legitimate or threatening. How word choice and source selection shape the picture in the gender debate is explained at gendermedia.nl. The fact that NRC at least gives these voices a platform is a positive development. That they still carry a delegitimising label is precisely what the feminists are fighting against.

What is at stake

The Gender Recognition Act is not the only place where this fault line runs, but it is the most concrete. Anyone who equates sex with self-declaration accepts that a biologically male body belongs in a women’s shelter, a women’s prison, a women’s changing room or a women’s sports competition as soon as its owner ticks that box. The fact that the gender-critical feminists who point this out describe it as “the greatest threat of all” is not hysteria. It is a calculation of the consequences. In his analysis, Vasterman gives them the credit that most newsrooms deny them: to be taken seriously for what they are actually saying, not for how well they fit the frame.