On 15 December 2025, a motion from GroenLinks-PvdA passed during the budget debate on emancipation policy: a narrow majority in the House of Representatives — GroenLinks-PvdA, D66, VVD, SP, Volt and 50PLUS — called on the government to resubmit the transgender law. Just six months earlier, on 2 July 2025, that same law had been withdrawn after the House had called for this twice. State Secretary Struycken had then complied with a motion from the SGP, JA21 and FvD, supported by the governing parties NSC, PVV and BBB.

This political back-and-forth concerns more than a procedural matter. The bill — parliamentary document 35.825 — seeks to abolish the mandatory expert statement currently required to change the sex recorded on a passport and birth certificate. In doing so, the law shifts something more fundamental than an administrative step: it determines who may establish what a person's legal sex is. The answer given by the proposal is: no one other than the individual concerned.

What exactly changes

Since the 2014 Transgender Act, changing sex registration has required a statement from an expert — usually a behavioural scientist or doctor — confirming that the applicant is durably convinced that they belong to the other sex. The bill removes that requirement: a self-declaration is enough. For young people under 16, judicial approval would replace the expert assessment — a procedural review taking the place of what was previously a substantive medical assessment.

SGP MP Diederik van Dijk called this careless when the bill was withdrawn in July 2025: "Vulnerable young people benefit from care and caution, not from abolishing the age limit and the expert statement." GroenLinks-PvdA MP Westerveld countered in the same debate that, by withdrawing the bill, the government was "pouring oil on the fire" for a group already facing increasing discrimination. Both parties were discussing the same legislation — but not the same problem.

The assumption no one examines out loud

Beneath the debate about due care lies an assumption that is rarely made explicit: that there is an ascertainable fact — the applicant's gender identity — which the expert previously confirmed and which the applicant will henceforth be allowed to report themselves. That assumption is precisely why the distinction between an "expert assessment" and a "self-declaration" is less significant than it sounds. The expert had no measuring instrument either; like the new law, the expert essentially asked what the applicant experienced themselves. As an earlier analysis of this issue explained, self-reporting has in practice always been the only source supporting a diagnosis of gender dysphoria or incongruence — there is no blood test, scan or other external criterion that independently confirms gender identity.

In a sense, this makes the amendment more honest than the old situation: it removes an apparently medical assessment that was substantively never more than a formalised conversation. But being honest about the method does not solve the underlying problem. If the only source for a claim is the person making that claim, the assertion becomes irrefutable by definition — whoever describes the feeling is automatically right. That pattern, in which the outcome of a test is already built into the wording of the question, is a form of circular reasoning, a familiar problem in the philosophy of science: it is not evidence, but a repetition of the claim.

What happens when a country has already done this

The Netherlands is not the first country to struggle with what self-declaration means in practice. In Germany, the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz has allowed sex registration on the basis of self-declaration since November 2024. Within a year, three states reported that the law was being used in ways the lawmakers had not anticipated — including by men using the change in registration to gain access to women's spaces, without any medical or psychological substantiation being required beforehand. Those cases are why those same states are demanding corrective legislation, less than two years after the law was introduced. This is not an argument that most applicants act in bad faith — they do not — but it does illustrate what happens when a law no longer contains any external criterion: the rare exception has free rein, precisely because there is nothing against which to assess it.

What a careful law should acknowledge

The question of whether the expert statement should disappear is ultimately a political balancing exercise between accessibility and safeguards — an exercise this dossier does not undertake on behalf of the legislature. What can be said is that the debate becomes more honest once both sides acknowledge that neither the old nor the new procedure provides an objective criterion for gender identity. The expert did not verify a fact independently of the applicant; the law therefore does not shift from "assessed" to "unassessed", but from "assessed by an intermediary who had to accept the same self-report" to "accepted directly". Anyone who, as a legal analysis of a related law demonstrates, follows the premise of self-identification through consistently will discover that virtually every other legal criterion for sex — from sports categories to women's shelters — is put on shaky ground once only self-reporting remains.

Sources

• NOS, "Much-discussed transgender law withdrawn after two calls from Parliament", 2 July 2025 — nos.nl/artikel/2573363
• Reformatorisch Dagblad, "Narrow majority in House of Representatives backs resubmission of transgender law", 15 December 2025 — rd.nl/artikel/1131591
• Senate of the States General, bill 35.825 "Changing the conditions for amending the sex recorded on a birth certificate" — eerstekamer.nl/wetsvoorstel/35825