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

Conversion Act: identity as a legal premise and the consequences

The Conversion Practices Act elevates “gender identity” from a contested psychological concept to a legally protected given. What that means legally, clinically and developmentally.

By Edward Jansen · 3 June 2026

What the law does

The Dutch Act criminalising conversion practices (Article 285ba of the Criminal Code) punishes anyone who, in the exercise of an office, profession or business or as part of an organisation, systematically or otherwise intrusively performs acts with the aim of changing or suppressing the sexual orientation or gender identity of a minor (of an adult only through abuse of superiority) (source). Calls for restraint, caution or reflection regarding a social or medical transition are expressly excluded, and a doctor or other care provider acting in line with the applicable standards of care is not punishable. The text of the law is framed symmetrically; according to the author, its effect is not. One direction of change becomes a crime — the attempt to shift the psyche. The opposite direction — adapting the body to the psyche — falls under regular care. The underlying mechanism is the same in both cases: enforcing congruence between body and psyche.

Identity as a legal presupposition

The law does something legally new: it codifies “gender identity” as a fixed, indivisible, knowable given. Not as a hypothesis, not as a psychological construct with empirical limits, but as a legal premise. Everyone has a gender identity; that identity is whatever the person says it is; a professional attempt to change or suppress it can carry criminal consequences.

For anyone who reads the terms the way developmental psychologists use them, this is a startling step. Adolescent identity development is by definition malleable, context-dependent and in flux. Desistance research found that in a large share of children with gender dysphoria before puberty it later disappeared (in a 2022 systematic review: 83 percent of 251 participants), although those studies are of low quality and the concept is contested (source). The Cass Review documents how strongly comorbidity (autism, trauma, internalised homophobia) clouds the picture of “identity”. The law legally excludes that complexity.

The two directions

Classical conversion therapy adapted the psyche to the body: conversation, prayer, in extreme cases aversion. Rarely irreversible — a conversation that goes wrong leaves the body intact. Transition medicine reverses the direction: the body is adapted to the postulated identity. Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, mastectomy, vaginoplasty, phalloplasty. Definitive, physical, in many cases irreversible.

The medical dossier on puberty blockers — how they work, their risks and the international reconsideration — is available at puberteitsremmers.nl.

The law treats these directions unequally. The first is a crime. The second falls under regular care.

The definitional error

Here the presupposition backfires. If gender identity is fixed — innate, immutable, knowable to the child itself — then physical transition is, strictly speaking, superfluous. A fixed given does not need to be confirmed by scalpel or injection. If identity is malleable, shaped by experience and development, then exploration is exactly what a minor needs, and criminalising that exploration is a blockade of self-knowledge.

The Conversion Practices Act combines the most restrictive element of both models at once. Identity is so fixed that the professional attempt to change it becomes punishable — and at the same time so open that the body must yield to fit the psyche. Philosophically that is a contradiction. Legally it works out as asymmetry.

Asymmetry in practice

• A psychologist who explores where the dysphoria comes from (trauma, autism, internalised homophobia, social pressure): according to the text of the law punishable only for systematic or intrusive acts aimed at changing or suppressing gender identity; critics fear that this line is vague in practice (source).
• A doctor who gives a sixteen-year-old girl a mastectomy: falls within the law.
• The law punishes the professional attempt to change gender identity and leaves the medical route within regular care (Article 285ba, paragraph 7).

Proportionality reversed

The principle of proportionality says: the more drastic an act, the heavier the safeguards. The Conversion Practices Act inverts this. A conversation that goes wrong causes psychological harm, sometimes serious, but leaves the body intact. A medical pathway that goes wrong leaves no breasts, no fertility, reduced bone density, sexual dysfunction. Chloe Cole, Keira Bell and Clementine Breen are the faces of that irreversibility.

A law that criminalises the least drastic intervention and protects the most drastic inverts the principle of proportionality. That is not a detail. It is an inversion of how medical and legal thinking normally work.

Consequence for the consulting room

A clinician who suspects comorbidity in a minor patient and works on it therapeutically takes, according to the author, a legal risk under this law, although a care provider acting in line with the applicable standards of care is expressly not punishable (source). Not because she is “converting” anyone, but because the effect of her work — if the patient later no longer wants transition — can be read after the fact as an “attempt to influence”. The chilling effect shifts standard care towards affirming: legally the safest option, clinically not always the right one.

International contradiction

Sweden (Socialstyrelsen 2022), Finland (COHERE 2020) and England (Cass 2024) have moved their clinical practice towards more restraint: Socialstyrelsen gives a weak negative recommendation for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in minors and sees treatment only in exceptional cases, preferably within research (source); the Finnish guideline names psychosocial care as the first treatment and urges extreme caution with puberty blockers under 18 (source, via the Cass Review); and NHS England decided in March 2024 that puberty blockers are no longer a routinely commissioned treatment for under-18s (source). In Norway, Ukom (2023) recommended defining these treatments as experimental treatment (source). The Netherlands takes a different course: the Dutch Health Council advised in June 2026 not to organise transgender care for young people differently, but to anchor the standards of care more firmly (source).

What a neutral law would do

A truly neutral law places both directions under the same standard. No attempt to force anyone — through conversation or through the body — in a direction that does not arise from their own informed, adult choice. For minors: the highest safeguards, whichever way. That is not what exists today. What exists is a legal preference for one type of conversion over the other, packaged as protection.