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Conversion Act: identity as a legal premise and the consequences

The Conversion Practices Act elevates “gender identity” from a contested psychological concept to a legal fact that may no longer be questioned. What that means legally, clinically and developmentally.

By Edward Jansen · 3 June 2026

What the law does

The Conversion Practices Act prohibits attempts to change or suppress a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The text of the law is framed symmetrically; its effect is not. One direction of change becomes a crime — the attempt to question or 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; questioning 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 shows that a large share of pre-pubertal dysphoria disappears without intervention. 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 questioning 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 parent who says “let’s wait until you are eighteen”: risks prosecution.
• A psychologist who explores where the dysphoria comes from (trauma, autism, internalised homophobia, social pressure): risks prosecution.
• A doctor who gives a sixteen-year-old girl a mastectomy: falls within the law.
• The law punishes the conversation and protects the scalpel.

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 a legal risk under this law. 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 (SBU 2022), Finland (COHERE 2020), England (Cass 2024), Norway (Ukom 2023) and Denmark (2023) have moved their clinical practice in precisely the direction the Dutch law criminalises: psychological exploration first, medical intervention as a last resort and with the highest safeguards. The Netherlands moves the opposite way: medically unchanged, the conversation punishable.

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 is on the table. What is on the table is a legal preference for one type of conversion over the other, packaged as protection.