Radical feminists see the Transgender Law as the greatest threat to women
Peter Vasterman points to the NRC piece by Menno Sedee in which gender-critical feminists — branded "radical" by the Transgender Law camp — explain why self-identification undermines the 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 resisting the planned amendment of the Transgender Law. Vasterman picked up on the piece because, for the first time in the Dutch quality press, it gave 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 cabinet wants to amend the law so that the trip to court and the expert statement fall away. A signature at the municipality then suffices to officially change sex. "With a legal amendment it becomes easier to officially change sex," Sedee and Vasterman summarise the essence.
"The greatest threat to women"
The feminists who speak in the NRC piece are not unimportant. They are lawyers, former shelter directors, sports coaches and historians who have their positions in stone. Their analysis, as NRC presents it: "Gender-critical feminists see this as the greatest threat to women." No rhetorical exaggeration for show, but a substantiated claim. If sex becomes exclusively self-identification, the legal category "woman" disappears as a protected group. Quotas, statistics, health research, shelter for abused women, women's sport, women's prisons, target-group policy — everything the second feminist wave conquered in eighty years rests on a measurably demarcated category. Open that category to self-declaration, and the basis falls away.
One rights struggle over another
The NRC article also gives the counter-voice: the amendment is taking place "to the anger of the transgender movement". Not because trans organisations are against simplification — they actively want it — but because they dismiss every question about colliding rights as transphobia. Vasterman points out that this is precisely the mechanism that in other Western countries led to lawsuits, clinic closures and political disasters: a rights framework presenting itself as a pure expansion of freedom while in practice restricting the rights of another group — biological women. The NRC piece lays out that collision sharply for the first time in an established Dutch medium.
What the amendment concretely does
The current Transgender Law (since 2014) requires an expert statement from a psychologist or doctor. The amendment scraps it. Vasterman points out in his other analyses that the evaluation on which this scrapping is based is methodologically weak — three interviewed psychologists, four surveys with unclear samples, one survey with nine participants. Parliament is being advised to remove on this basis a threshold that actually works in practice: nearly three-quarters of municipal officials experience the statement as a barrier against fraud and rash changes. What remains if the statement falls: an open self-identification system that in every country where it was introduced led within five years to lawsuits about women's spaces.
Why this is not "just a small law"
The Dutch political class has presented the amendment for years as technical fine-tuning. That it only became publicly contested in 2022 is, according to Vasterman, a symptom of Dutch media blindness on this file. In the United Kingdom, a comparable proposal — the reform of the Scottish Gender Recognition Act — led to a political crisis, the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, and ultimately to blocking by Westminster. In Spain, an avalanche followed in women's crime statistics after the self-ID law took effect. In the United States, women who point to these consequences — J.K. Rowling the best-known example — are demonised campaign-wise. The same dynamic threatens in the Netherlands.
The "radical" label
One of the sharpest signals in the NRC piece is the framing itself. Women who point out concrete consequences for women's spaces are not described as concerned, as critical, or as legally trained. They get the label "radical" — a label that for years was linked to terrorism, extremism and irrationality. Vasterman points out that this has become the standard media frame for women who question the self-identification doctrine. The language is no detail: it determines whether a reader perceives the voice as legitimate or as a threat. That NRC at least lets these voices speak is progress. That they still carry a delegitimising label is exactly what the feminists are fighting against.
What is at stake here
The Transgender Law is not the only place where this fault line runs, but it is the most concrete. Whoever makes sex coincide 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 the bearer ticks the box. That the feminists who point this out use the label "greatest threat" is not hysteria. It is a calculation. Vasterman gives them in his analysis the credit most editorial desks deny them: being taken seriously for what they substantively say, not for how they fit the frame.