Exploring (anti-)gender articulations around the Dutch Transgender Bill 2021: Liberal cisnormativity through cautious policymaking and compassion

Abstract

This article examines arguments contesting the Dutch Transgender Bill of 2021, situating them within the context of Dutch sexual politics. Drawing on feminist discourse analysis, I first analyze how terms such as gender and “gender ideology” are articulated. I then conceptualize part of this contestation as liberal cisnormativity, pointing toward a rhetorical device that enables a seemingly liberal critique of the legislation while not rejecting the societal relevance of gender outright. Yet, I argue, this rhetoric simultaneously reinforces the essentialization of sex, grants epistemic legitimacy to state officials and public figures, and obscures the scholarly challenges involved in theorizing gender and sex as entangled. By tracing these dynamics, the article contributes to the literature on anti-gender politics by showing how articulations of “gender ideology” may also draw on liberal thought to construct an allegedly empirically verifiable critique of gender as a non-rational belief system.

Introduction

In this article, I focus on the contestation of the Dutch Transgender Bill of 2021, which seeks to lower the barriers to legal sex designation (hereafter referred to as the Bill). ¹ The Dutch Transgender Act was introduced in 1984 and amended in 2014, but its procedure for sex designation still requires an expert statement. The Bill at hand seeks, among other changes, to remove this requirement, an issue that proved to be one of the most heated points of objection. This debate exemplifies how trans-related issues have become increasingly salient in political discourse internationally (e.g. Armitage, 2020; Gould, 2024; McLean, 2021; Verloo and Van Der Vleuten, 2020; Verlooy, 2024). By situating the Dutch case within this broader context, I examine how meanings of gender and sex are locally constructed and contested, and how these discursive dynamics culminated in the withdrawal of the Bill in July 2025. Moreover, I relate these contestations and constructions of gender and sex to a broader framework of anti-gender politics.

About gender contestations, Butler (2024) argues that gender has been figured as a threat whose perceived effects are often positioned in opposition to science or religion (pp. 4–5). In this reasoning, gender operates as a phantasm, understood as a “way of organizing the world wrought by the fear of a destruction for which gender is held responsible” (Butler, 2024: 11). Whereas some conceptualize gender as an “empty signifier” (Mayer and Sauer, 2017) within analyses of anti-gender politics, Butler (2024) prefers to write about an “overdetermined signifier,” condensing a wide range of historically and politically situated anxieties about perceived threats to the social order. Against this conceptual backdrop, the question arises: how does opposition to the Bill function as a discursive site through which gender is contested?

Although the expression of “gender ideology” did not play a prominent role in Dutch political rhetoric before 2018 (Verloo, 2018a), it became one of the key elements in the contestation of the Bill. In August 2022 (shortly before the parliamentary debate), the Gendertwijfel campaign (Gender doubt) released a manifesto titled “The new Transgender Bill affects everyone,” fueling political debate. In this three-page text, the term “gender ideology” occupies a central position, indicating the circulation of the expression in the Netherlands (see also Hertoghs et al., 2024; Krebbekx, 2025; Segers, 2024; Täuber et al., 2025).

As my analysis will show, the Dutch contestation of the Bill cannot entirely be grasped under categories such as “ultraconservative” nor “illiberal” (Grzebalska et al., 2017; Korolczuk, 2020; Korolczuk et al., 2025), yet part of this contestation still relies on expressions like ‘gender ideology,’ ‘gender theory,’ and ‘genderism’ (Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017: 2) to articulate their concerns and objections. So, what insights can the Dutch case offer into the circulation of this vocabulary?

Generally speaking, I position anti-gender politics as multi-faceted, transnational constellations of political, religious, and civil society actors who contest gender, as part of their strategies and struggles (Graff and Korolczuk, 2021; Holvikivi et al., 2024; Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017; Verloo, 2018b). These constellations appear to be held together less by a common agenda or ideological coherence than by a shared framing of gender as a site of threat or ideological imposition—opposing what is portrayed as “gender ideology” (Corrêa et al., 2023). In this sense, gender operates as a rallying point through which political antagonisms are articulated by actors competing for cultural hegemony (Grzebalska et al., 2017; Kováts, 2018; Paternotte, 2023).

Although transnational in its approach, it has been demonstrated that anti-gender politics easily adapt to local customs, mobilizing the language of particular histories and traditions and thus facilitating its dissemination and appeal (Murray, 2022; Paternotte, 2023). Moreover, far-right and anti-gender rhetoric should not be viewed as one and the same, as variations concerning views on gender/sex equality exist throughout the political spectrum (de Lange and Mügge, 2015; Paternotte and Kuhar, 2018, see also Amery and Mondon, 2024). ² Anti-gender rhetoric is thus not confined to a specific political orientation, and may also circulate within ostensibly liberal or leftist positions (see e.g. Ojeda et al., 2024: 10).

In the current political climate of intensified attention for trans struggles and rights, research has, for example, traced how health professionals opt out of provision of health on moral appeals to conscientious objection (Milionis and Toska, 2023), how invocations of free speech (McLean, 2021) or science (Baider, 2025) perpetuate demonization of trans people, but also how feminists contribute to this conflict by centering on sex-based protection of girls and women (Armitage, 2020; Hines, 2025).

To explore the arguments contesting the Bill in the Netherlands, I need the notion of articulations as developed by Laclau and Mouffe (1985) to foreground the discursive practices through which a particular social order is constituted, and the meanings of social institutions are provisionally fixed. Articulations, in this sense, refer to the contingent and temporary fixation of meanings that emerge through discursive struggle, whereby specific signifiers come to organize social relations and political identities within a hegemonic formation (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 105). As Sarah Bracke observes, “[t]he very concept of gender is under attack [in the Netherlands], both as an analytical category as well as what the concept invokes and stands for” (Täuber et al., 2025: 81). By tracking how meanings surrounding gender/sex are being articulated and thus fixated, I seek to examine the processes through which the boundaries of intelligibility around gender are produced, thereby revealing the ideological work at play. Put differently, I do not seek to determine whether the presented claims are true or false, nor do I aim to assess the moral legitimacy of any given position.

Tracking the different arguments against the Bill has led me to identify a particular form of contestation, a particular articulation, which I call liberal cisnormativity. This notion describes a seemingly liberal rhetorical device that, rather than relying on overt hostility, operates through appeals to liberal thought, thereby rendering cisnormative assumptions both seemingly objective and legally legitimate. As I will show, this aligns well with (a selection of) liberal values that are prevalent within the Dutch context, while at the same time contributing to anti-gender politics, without necessarily always being named or recognized as such.

This article begins with a brief overview of the Dutch Transgender Law, after which I introduce the notion of Dutch sexual politics and cisnormativity. The article then outlines the study’s methodological framework. In the analysis, I examine the various meanings attributed to terms such as gender, sex, and “gender ideology,” highlighting the discursive grounds on which the Bill is contested. In the second part of the analysis, the notion of liberal cisnormativity is fully established. Finally, the article discusses the analytical usefulness of this notion in relation to anti-gender politics.

The Dutch Transgender Act

The Netherlands has been acknowledged for its pioneering role in progressive policies on trans care and gender-affirming surgeries, securing an international reputation (see Bakker, 2021; Soto-Lafontaine, 2020). In April 1985, the Netherlands was part of the first European cohort to adopt new regulations granting legal recognition for “transsexual” people (i.e. from female (F) to male (M), or vice versa). For legal sex designation in official documents, next to an expert statement and appeal to court, Dutch law predicated hormone therapy, sex reassignment surgery, and irreversible infertility by removal of the ovaries or testes. The latter is also referred to as state-enforced sterilization, which today is recognized as violating bodily integrity and private life (Commissioner for Human Rights, 2009). The requirement of being unmarried or divorced expired on the first of April 2001, when same-sex marriage became legalized in the Netherlands. To this day, the Act does not provide legal recognition for a third option for legal sex registration. At the same time, Dutch courts have granted numerous requests for “gender-neutral” registration of sex, necessitating further legal developments (Schotel and Mügge, 2021).

The early years of the twenty-first century marked a widespread cultural change in the discourse about gender, which can partly be explained through the various lists of (not legally binding) recommendations to ensure appropriate measures on a broad range of human rights and their application to issues of gender identity and sexual orientation. As early as 2007, the third principle of the Yogyakarta document suggested that “no one shall be forced to undergo medical procedures, including sex reassignment surgery, sterilization or hormonal therapy, as a requirement for legal recognition of their gender identity” (International Commission of Jurists, 2007: 11–12). Due to the lack of enforcement of these principles in the Act of 1985, Human Rights Watch pointed out that the Netherlands has “lost its leading edge” by being “wholly out of step with current best practice and understandings of the Netherlands’ obligations under international human rights law” (Ridderbos, 2011: 1).

The long-discussed but expected legal change came into force in July 2014, followed by a formal apology from the Dutch government to trans and intersex people in November 2021. This change rendered bodily adaptation unnecessary, as it was considered outdated and a violation of human rights (van den Brink and Snaathorst, 2017). Simultaneously, the procedure’s nature shifted from judicial to administrative, with expert statements confirming a “lasting conviction to belong to the opposite sex” playing a vital role, replacing the expensive and time-consuming petition orders in court. Even though not all parliamentary parties were in favor of the latter, its opposition still agreed to this bill due to the urgent necessity to remove the legal requirement of bodily interventions.

This article investigates the Transgender Bill of May 2021, initiated by the former Minister for Legal Protection Sander Dekker and the former Minister of Education, Culture and Science Ingrid van Engelshoven, which aimed to administratively simplify the sex designation procedure by: (a) erasing the expert statement; (b) adding the possibility for teenagers under the age of 16 to judicially designate their legal sex by appealing to court; (c) introducing a procedure for sex re-registration; (d) further smoothening the application by including the registrar of the applicants’ place of residence rather than of birth.

The Bill’s deliberation unfolded over politically turbulent events. In September 2023, the demissionary Cabinet-Rutte IV postponed further deliberation until a new coalition was formed. ³ In November 2023, it became clear that the far-right Party for Freedom (PVV) won parliamentary elections with 37 out of 150 parliamentary seats, leading to the right-wing Cabinet-Schoof in July 2024. Meantime, in April 2024, a motion was submitted to withdraw the Bill in its totality, ⁴ and while the motion was supported by a slim majority (see Appendix 1), the Minister of Legal Protection Franc Weerwind and the Minister of Education, Culture and Science Robbert Dijkgraaf refused to act upon, as any decision on the Bill, they argued, demanded a careful and considerate continuation of the debate. In April 2025, the same motion was again introduced in Parliament, urging its adoption. ⁵ When the Cabinet-Schoof collapsed prematurely in June 2025, as the PVV pulled out of the four-party coalition, this did not stop the demissionary State Secretary Teun Struycken from withdrawing the Bill in July 2025. In December 2025, under the now demissionary Cabinet-Schoof and a reshaping of parliamentary seats after elections, a new motion was submitted, this time urging for the return of the Bill (see Appendix 1). ⁶ The motion was accepted, implying that the withdrawal of the Bill does not necessarily mark its definitive end.

Dutch sexual politics demarcated by cisness

In this section, the concept of Dutch sexual politics is introduced to underscore how perpetuation of violence can be done in the name of preserving a certain progress (Butler, 2008: 19), after which the notion of cisnormativity is further contextualized to highlight another dimension of sexual politics.

To begin, Dutch national identity has long been strongly associated with progressiveness and tolerance. Since the late 1980s, the emergence of civilizational discourses has contributed to new forms of national self-identification, in which secularism, multiculturalism, and sexual politics have become central markers of what is imagined as Dutch identity and modernity (e.g. Bracke, 2011; Butler, 2008; Prins, 2000).

Such sexual politics, in Butler’s (2008) view, are based on a hegemonic conception of progress, due to which those who are viewed as not modern enough are subjected to certain practices of violence and coercion. In this sense, sexual politics eludes pluralism and contestation, while pushing for “assimilation to a set of cultural norms that are understood as internally self-sufficient” (Butler, 2008: 5).

To offer a more tangible example, sexual politics, framed in liberal freedoms, do not function as a safety net for diversity and cultural minorities but are instead mobilized as the ultimate sign of Western superiority or modernity (Butler, 2008; de Leeuw and van Wichelen, 2008; Oudenampsen, 2018). Islam, for example, has often been (and still is) framed as “backwards” and “in need of integration,” partly due to its alleged homophobia (e.g. Bracke, 2011; Butler, 2008; Mepschen and Duyvendak, 2012; Mepschen et al., 2010). In addition, notions such as homonationalism (Puar, 2007) and femonationalism (Farris, 2017) draw attention to the instrumentalization of sexual emancipation and women’s rights to exclude racialized and religious Othered.

Scholarly work on Dutch sexual politics clearly outlines the exclusionary dimensions of liberalism. Butler (2008: 6), for example, writes that liberal freedoms within sexual politics suggest an antinomy within the discourse of liberal rights, where certain cultural forms of sexual scripts function as a precondition for liberal freedom. From a different angle, it has been argued that “Dutch tolerance” itself is culturally naturalized, which suggests that Dutch sexual nationalism is not viewed as a “product of an ongoing contingent, historical, progressive social struggle but as inherently Dutch” (Mepschen, 2017: 22). As a result, it carries a conservative implication, masking its historical and political contingency through claims of cultural essentialism.

To come to an understanding of what happened to the Bill, it is necessary to highlight another dimension of these sexual politics, namely their cisnormative dimension. For this purpose, I believe it is important to account for the relatively progressive attitudes and laws in the country, and I therefore consider notions such as heteronormativity or patriarchy too abstract to grasp the Bill’s contestation in the Dutch context. Although such concepts are useful for identifying deep-seated power structures, they might risk overlooking more culturally specific dynamics that mold gender contestations (Murray, 2022; Paternotte, 2023). This does not mean that heteronormative or patriarchal assumptions are absent in the Netherlands. Rather, they may be embedded in seemingly neutral arguments and policies, making them harder to capture through structural frameworks alone.

As this study requires a more context-sensitive analysis that attends to local discourses, institutional arrangements, and normative commitments, I add the notion of cisness into the equation. The term cis was coined by the trans community in the 1990s to, amongst other things, add a negative comparison to trans epistemologies (Radi, 2019). The latter refers to legitimization of embodied experiences, self-understanding, and community knowledge as valid and necessary forms of expertise (see e.g. Stryker and Whittle, 2006).

Cisness, subsequently, refers to the structural and institutional perpetuation of binary separatism between sexes by ignorantly delegitimizing critical feminist and queer theories of gender/sex, which in turn reaffirms processes that further pathologize trans struggles (Amery, 2025: 4). To capture the structural functioning of cisness in my research, I employ the term cisnormativity to foreground its status as a default, organizing logic: an often invisible, taken-for-granted framework that structures social expectations, institutional practices, and normative assumptions about sex. In this sense, cisnormativity naturalizes and prioritizes cisness, positioning it as the baseline through which bodies, identities, and social relations are interpreted and made intelligible.

Although the term cis has been debated for its possible derogatory or inappropriate implications due to the socially constructed role of all genders/sexes, I agree with Radi (2019: 55) that such critiques “tend to dissolve the map of power relations organized around the cis/trans axis by making it illegible” (see also Ahmed, 2016). Although the cis/trans binary is indeed an oversimplification, and gender/sex inequalities would ideally be unthinkable, present conditions nonetheless require specific vocabularies to generate the conceptual tools necessary to name and address injustices.

Furthermore, cisness, as a descriptive term of social movements, has also been linked to what is called cisfeminism, a feminist position that “centers and universalizes the perspectives of cis women” (Amery, 2025: 3). In Feminism against Cisness, Heaney (2024: 1) explains how “cisness ontologizes sex as a binary of bodily forms,” anchoring it in a static, biological framework. In this logic, cisness operates as “self-evident empiricism” (Heaney, 2024: 2) and a “biologizing ideology” (Heaney, 2024: 10). Insofar as cisness and trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) are grounded in a shared epistemic orientation, the term TERF warrants closer contextualization. TERF describes a political position, “that of a [radical] feminist who believes that ‘biological sex’ determines who a person is” (Tudor, 2020: 2). This political position is plural, as scholarly work distinguishes multiple forms of TERFness (see e.g. Cabral Grinspan et al., 2023). While many exclude TERF positions from feminism, I follow Bassi and LaFleur (2022) in noting that feminism is not monolithic and has historically accommodated various systems of oppressions (pp. 320–332).

One final observation is that a wide range of actors (from right-wing to religious groups) are now being labeled as TERF, complicating the label’s application since not all who employ trans-exclusionary rhetoric identify as feminists (Serano, 2018). What is more, in the late 2010s, proponents of trans-exclusionary feminism engaged in a “rebranding,” now describing themselves as gender-critical (Hines, 2025; Thurlow, 2024). Others also propose that this rebranding obscures the trans-exclusionary focus by framing their stance as a pro-woman defense of sex-based rights. As Thurlow (2024) observes, “this approach allows for nominal acceptance of trans people while simultaneously campaigning for trans-exclusion” (p. 967).

The question that emerges from this section is how cisnormativity can be cloaked in the language of liberal freedoms, a point I will unpack further below.

Data and methodology

Methodological framework and data collection

This study employs a feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) to map the various articulations that contest the Bill, thereby (re)producing a particular social order that sustains (hierarchically) gendered social arrangements (Lazar, 2007, 2017; Lazar and Kramarae, 2011). As an approach, FCDA is “concerned with demystifying the interrelationship of gender, power, and ideology in discourse” (Lazar, 2007: 144).

To explore the gendered social order in the Bill’s contestation, the starting point of my analysis was the parliamentary debate that took place on September 27 and 28, 2022. I then added the popular debate since the Bill’s introduction in 2021 until the end of 2023, as published in six national newspapers—De Telegraaf (right-wing, conservative leaning), Reformatorisch Dagblad (orthodox Protestant, socially conservative), Nederlands Dagblad (moderate Christian), Trouw (center-left progressive), NRC (liberal-centrist), and de Volkskrant (center-left progressive). The two remaining Dutch dailies, Algemeen Dagblad and Het Financiele Dagblad, were excluded from the data corpus, as they are less oriented toward opinionated public debate, focusing instead on general reporting, business, and financial news, respectively.

News articles were collected using the academic research database Nexis Uni. The search was conducted using the term “Transgenderwet” combined with words “Nederland” or “Tweede Kamer.” This specific query produced a list of articles with minimal international coverage, focusing primarily on the Dutch context. The resulting set of 165 articles was then categorized by content. Group A included articles presenting arguments against the Bill; Group B comprised articles presenting arguments in favor of the Bill; Group C contained articles that presented both perspectives; Group D included articles that mentioned the Bill but did not introduce any new arguments by the author. For the analysis, I have only included the contents of Group A, and the objecting arguments of Group C, comprising a total of 51 news articles.

Throughout the analysis, drawing from references in the parliamentary debate and news articles, I tracked additional actors that contest the Bill; documents such as manifestos and leaflets were also included in the dataset, alongside transcripts of online interviews (see Appendix 2).

Coding process

Generally speaking, a critical discourse analysis does not start with a fixed theoretical and methodological position (Wodak, 2021: 36). Therefore, my coding approach was inductive. Initially, I coded according to two broad themes: first, the different meanings ascribed to gender/sex and “gender ideology”; and second, the arguments contesting the Bill. I began by tracking arguments across specific subject groups (e.g. women, children, trans people), later organizing these arguments into overarching themes of contestation, such as “biological,” “religious,” and “sexual politics.” In addition, I coded affective expressions (Ahmed, 2004) through utterances such as “death threats” and “having the courage to speak out” (coded as fear), or “we need to be careful” (coded as cautious).

Once I had identified liberal cisnormativity as my analytical focus, I returned to the data and coded themes such as “individual freedoms,” “ideology,” “rationality,” or “cisnormativity.” For this article, I focused specifically on the codes that allowed me to identify liberal cisnormativity, which necessarily required setting aside other arguments present in the data. I therefore do not claim that this analysis captures the contestation of the Bill in its entirety. Rather, this article aims to add to scholarship on anti-gender politics by demonstrating the grammar of liberal cisnormativity.

Lastly, I have translated all the citations subtracted from the data. Where needed, the quotations are lightly edited for readability. In correspondence with the ethics agreement established with the University of Amsterdam, for safety reasons, I refer only to the name of the newspaper and the year of publication of the included articles. I do include the names of politicians and other public figures; the latter group has been informed about this study.

Biological reality versus subjective swings: Gender/sex and “gender ideology”

Exploring how gender is contested at the parliamentary level, I begin by capturing the tone of the Bill’s deliberation. A recurring appeal was the cautionary statement not to engage in an “ugly debate” and to show respect for those directly affected by the legislation. Most of the participating politicians highlighted how polarized the public debate is and urged each other to stick to “objective knowledge” claims. This ambition, however, appeared to be difficult to achieve, as participants struggled to grasp the “true nature” of the Bill’s simplification: does it only concern an administrative procedure, or should one also be attentive to other social, legal, and medical consequences the Bill may bring about? While the proponents of the Bill kept underscoring its administrative nature, the opposition called out such conclusions, characterizing them as “extremely limited” (Reformed Political Party, SGP).

To manage this tension, the popular equation sex + culture = gender was invoked to bracket the category of sex for scientific sense-making, because, the argument goes, subjective realities (i.e. gender) cannot logically be subsumed within legal and medical frameworks. In her attempt to bring order to the debate, Nicki Pouw-Verweij from the far-right political party JA21, urged to wield care when talking about sex and gender by proposing the following definition:

To my knowledge, who you are, relates to your gender, your expression, and your feelings. The noted sex in your passport, in turn, informs about what you are. It is a biological fact: your sex. Gender and sex can align, but don’t have to, they are two separate things.

Interestingly, this point of order drew no objections from other Members of Parliament. This reveals three important points. First, not all far-right actors reject the societal relevance of gender outright. Second, gender here is strictly understood in the sense of one’s personal experience. Third, the expressed distinction between gender and sex reveals a partial recognition of individual liberty—the relative freedom to express one’s sense of being beyond biological determinism. Following Pouw-Verweij’s statement, sex is thus understood as a “biological reality that cannot be changed based on how someone feels,” whereas gender is grasped as a “highly personal feeling.” As explained by Raymond Knops from the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA): “It is about your identity, your personality, and how you relate to your environment. Who you are and how you feel is a highly personal matter, and it should stay that way.” These definitions resonate with statements circulating in wider public debate, where, for example, de Volkskrant (2022) writes that “the progressive trans ideology” is based on “alternative facts,” which contradict or deny “the basic biological fact that the mammalian species Homo sapiens are invariably hermaphroditic.”

This individualized understanding of gender is, however, not the only articulation of gender used to contest the Bill. Lydia Daniël, who describes herself on X as an “insufferable TERF,” elaborates on gender as follows:

Gender exists, meaning some women behave more masculine, and some men more feminine. But the conclusion some draw from this, in my opinion, is wrong. [The conclusion] that someone [like that] is also of the opposite sex. I think it’s a shame we draw that conclusion, because I feel that we had finally reached a society where you are allowed to be gender non-conforming (. . .). In my opinion, this achievement was something we could celebrate. And now I feel like we are bringing back those stereotypes (Two Peas in a Pod, 2023a).

Daniël, here, does not repute the significance of gender, but rather questions the emancipatory potential of changing one’s official sex and how this might encourage conformity to existing gender stereotypes. Here, gender is thus mainly understood as “cultural expectations about how men and women should behave” (Two Peas in a Pod,2023a). From the same perspective, others also contend that the Bill’s proposed legislation is not a progressive step toward equality, but rather a regressive move that risks reinforcing restrictive gender norms. As one commentary argues, “The Transgender Bill enables a new definition of gender. Why not first question the suffocating social norms surrounding being a man or woman?” (Trouw, 2022).

So far, the analysis indicates that although gender is contested within a broader socio-political context, not all gender-related articulations are dismissed or delegitimized. Whereas, for example, the CDA frames gender primarily as a private and individualized matter, Daniël appears to be more attentive to the structural constraints that shape binary gender roles and expectations.

As noted earlier, the potential consequences of the Bill are framed not only in terms of legal sex designation, but also in relation to broader cultural, social, and legal reverberations of redefining and rearticulating gender itself. The Gendertwijfel (2022) manifesto introduced above argues that the Bill entails sweeping and irreversible societal changes, calling for “careful and proper help” for trans people while simultaneously invoking terms such as “gender ideology” and “transgenderism” to contest the Bill. Although scholarship on contemporary forms of transphobia often demonstrates how scientific arguments can be utilized to posit trans people as “mentally ill creatures” (Baider, 2025: 8) or as “deceptive” (DeGagne, 2021: 505), this manifesto avoids such characterizations while still reproducing terms such as “transgenderism” that are explicitly connected to direct attacks on trans people. Once again, we observe the circulation of expressions closely linked to anti-gender politics, albeit articulated differently. This directs our attention to how the expression of “gender ideology” is deployed in the Netherlands.

Trend, hype, (gender) ideology

The terms “gender ideology,” “gender theory,” or “genderism” are not part of the political vocabularies of most Dutch parliamentarians. Instead, more nuanced lexicons—such as a “trend,” “hype,” or a “new social movement”—are more prominent. For example, Mirjam Bikker from the Christian Union (CU) stated that: “We recognize how this Bill correlates with the broader movement that prioritizes gender identity over biological sex.” Importantly, explicit mockery and denigration of gender also circulate in the Netherlands, most prominently within the Party for Freedom (PVV) and the Forum for Democracy (FvD), both of which have been examined in scholarship on the far right (see e.g. Segers, 2024; Verloo, 2018a). This article, however, focuses on the introduction of liberal cisnormativity, by which I aim to demonstrate a broader contestation of gender.

Moving beyond parliamentary debate, other alarmist interpretations of gender also emerge. The Christian organization NPV (short for Nederlandse Patiëntenvereniging, Dutch Patients’ Association), founded in 1982 and specializing in medical-ethical topics, published a leaflet titled “M-V-X-Y: About Sex and Gender, Identity and Culture” (NPV, 2023). Through a so-framed healthcare lens, NPV offers various definitions of terms such as sex, gender [dysphoria], and social transitioning. In this leaflet, a proposed causality effect pinpoints the increase in the number of trans people with a “new way of thinking about sex and gender” (NPV, 2023: 15). John Money and Judith Butler are suggested to be the founders of “the gender theory,” a field of study framed as a “pseudo-science.” The visible rise of trans people—“next to greater societal awareness, acceptance and available information” (NPV, 2023: 23)—is argued to underscore a cultural shift in thinking about sex and gender that should be considered as alarming, confusing, and anti-scientific. In NPV’s words:

This [gender theory] leads to all kinds of [bodily] variations or intermediate forms, where someone retains a penis but also receives breast implants. Or doesn’t want to have breasts but prefers to keep a vagina. To give expression to one’s transness is now seen as emancipation. This is the outcome of gender theory (NPV, 2023: 24).

This passage foregrounds confusion and fear around bodily transitioning, presenting trans bodies as unnatural or grotesque. Such articulations are not only limited to bodily transformations but also extend to institutional and ideological anxieties, which are argued to be culturally and democratically destabilizing. The Gendertwijfel manifesto warns of the Bill’s consequences, which are articulated from the position of women, children, and trans people themselves. In this manifesto, “gender ideology” explicitly addresses the Bill’s perceived anti-democratic roots:

Gender ideology poses a serious threat to the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression. (. . .) Diversity thinking promoted by the gender movement threatens pluralism. Adherence to this new liberal dogma increasingly serves as a ticket to participation in the democratic rule of law. Those who do not subscribe to it are excluded. The diversity agenda constitutes a direct threat to the pluralism of society.

This framing suggests that supporters of the Bill undermine foundational liberal values by enforcing ideological conformity. These tensions, at times discussed in view of their supposed anti-scientific backing, raise concerns about the emergence of a new social reality. Similarly, an article in the NRC (2022) warns that “Without a shared reality and agreement on objective facts, there can be no such things as a society.” Another commentary in de Volkskrant (2022) describes the Court of Human Rights’ reasoning as routine, arguing that the Court reflects a Thatcherite stance: “there is no such thing as society, only individual human rights.”

Caroline van der Plas, former party leader of the center-right Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), also echoed the sentiment of feeling silenced: “It is ridiculous how everyone with a critical stance nowadays is being excluded, reviled or cancelled by the woke community,” adding, “I’m annoyed with the fact how quickly people get labelled as transphobic or misogynist.” Here, again, the narrative pivots from concerns about biology to broader anxieties about free speech, cancellation, and democratic erosion. The utilization of freedom of speech, thus, can be seen as an important element through which the Bill is contested (for a detailed description of freedom of speech see Bracke, 2024).

Addressing fear of or distaste for moral accusations is a prevailing emotion in the newspapers. As mentioned in De Telegraaf (2021): “Those who ask questions are placed in a minefield.” Invocations of aggression and intolerance, alongside narratives of receiving (death) threats, fears of professional or public repercussions, and claims of silencing, form the affective vocabulary through which the Bill is contested. The many articulations that emulsify gender with fear illustrate how the act of gender self-identification is portrayed as a “new religion, one that suppresses our freedom” (De Telegraaf, 2021).

Thus far, I have shown how the phantasmatic scene of gender operates (Butler, 2024). Notably, gender is not mobilized to directly oppose or ridicule trans people. Rather, it functions as a vehicle through which broader social and political anxieties are articulated, predominantly against the academic, cultural, and political elite.

In the name of cautious policymaking and compassion: Liberal cisnormativity

In this section, I introduce the notion of liberal cisnormativity, which appears not as a separate set of isolated ideas but as a mode of articulation in which various contestations of the Bill can be cloaked. My goal is to demonstrate how seemingly liberal rhetoric can also be mobilized to contest the Bill, and how the sexual politics it invokes provide a revealing case of the adaptability of anti-gender politics.

The prevalence of Dutch sexual politics is perhaps best exemplified by Pouw-Verweij, who, at the time of the interview, was a member of the far-right party JA21:

Look, on the one hand, we’re simply a very liberal and accepting country. You’re allowed to be who you want to be, you can marry whoever you want, and the Dutch are very proud of that. And when we hear people in, for example, the United States speak differently about these things, we express our outrage. So, the idea that you might be dot-dot-dot-phobic is really considered one of the worst insults you can throw at someone. You can see that politicians are very cautious about this (Two Peas in a Pod, 2023b).

This passage not only reflects the previously noted registers of fear, but it also vividly illustrates the socio-cultural expectations felt by politicians concerning the demands of Dutch sexual politics. In the parliamentary debate, such awareness is articulated through recurring terms such as “risky,” “care,” “careful,” “irresponsible,” and “concern.” These lexical choices are repeatedly foregrounded to contest the Bill as part of a conservative discourse of cautious policymaking, where attention is also paid to the alarming rise of hate speech and violence against trans people in the Netherlands, often advocating for equal treatment for all.

This attitude is also reflected by Bart-Jan Spruyt (opGROEIsymposium, 2023), one of the initiators of Gendertwijfel, who stated that: “People often think that if you oppose the Bill, you simply do not hold any emotions or compassion towards those who struggle with their identity or sexual identity. However, the opposite is true, most people who oppose the Bill do so because of it.” Spruyt argues that “gender ideology” qualifies as an ideology because it is not grounded in shared facts but in personal feelings and convictions that are now expected to be universally accepted and are, in his view, being enforced by the state through the Bill. This perspective demonstrates how a part of the contestation is framed as protection and care rather than prejudice, which turns resistance into a moral act of compassion, but also how the absence of a shared consensus on the meaning of gender is framed through appeals to rationality and empirical evidence, particularly by portraying gender as a feeling that supposedly lacks scientific grounding.

To continue, liberal values also appear, for example, in the context of the costs of trans care. The People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) voices concerns about the expenses of the administrative process, a point echoed by several other actors. Among them is Voorzij (2022), an organization founded in 2020 by Caroline Franssen, whose work primarily subscribes to TERF. I want to highlight here an argument made by Franssen concerning cosmetic surgery for women, which she frames as an unequal access to bodily enhancements:

I’m not against these surgeries, but I wonder why the Dutch taxpayers should be contributing to them. It is rather expensive and not right either. Why should men who feel like ugly women be supported in their surgeries, and women with the same insecurities not? Why do women need to pay for their breast augmentation out of their own pockets, but men who wish to have the same operation are collectively reimbursed? (Two Peas in a Pod, 2023a)

In the above, we see how notions of individual equality are being articulated in ways that challenge the prevailing perception of the Bill. By reframing the debate in terms of fairness and distributive justice, the focus shifts from questions of recognition and rights for trans people towards a broader critique of state expenditure and collective care. ⁷ This rhetorical move not only resonates with liberal thought of personal responsibility and market efficiency, but it also (intentionally or not) foregrounds the gray zones in which gender-affirming care for trans people overlaps with procedures and wishes of others. It has been argued, for example, that a strict distinction between gender-affirming interventions for trans and cis people reflects a form of medical exceptionalism, one that risks perpetuating structural injustices faced by trans people (Schall and Moses, 2023). Of course, Franssen’s example appears not to be rooted in solidarity as the comparison imposes an antagonistic “we versus them” dynamic between trans people and women, producing a zero-sum logic of entitlement and access.

Since cisness is an important element in TERF vocabularies—which constructs “biological” sex as the decisive analytic for feminist politics and health justice, intending to exclude trans women from the category of women—it is worth staying with this example a little longer. Voorzij’s website offers, for example, an extensive gender glossary, or a list of various “sex” violations and/or crimes, through which the organization aims to emphasize not the incidental but rather the structural harm the Bill is argued to impose. This organization is also linked to Women’s Declaration International (WDI), an international think tank that drafted a Declaration on Women’s Sex Based Rights advocating for an understanding of women’s rights as anchored in sex.

To coin another example demonstrating the sex-based approach, Franssen anchors sexual difference as an ontological one by highlighting the lack of research on female development, warning that the Bill poses serious health risks for trans people. She argues that omitting one’s official sex from documents could lead to misdiagnoses, as symptoms and treatments often differ between women and men. This argument appears frequently in the analyzed newspapers about the Bill and reflects a cisnormative logic that universalizes women’s experiences in medical care, effectively erasing trans people from consideration while claiming that such an approach might also harm them, as they are said to require different forms of sex-care.

Considering how cisnormativity names the power structure and social hierarchy within which specific “stylized repetitions of acts” (Butler, 1990) are privileged or assumed as default, scholars have further conceptualized cisness by drawing attention to its connectedness with colonial power (Heaney, 2024), and, for example, white feminism (Amery, 2025). This brings me to liberal cisnormativity: because not all actors who contest the Bill identify as feminists or adhere to the gender-critical discourse, I will use the rest of this section to elucidate on liberal cisnormativity. The notion refers to a rhetorical device embedded within liberal thought that systematically privileges and essentializes cisness, while simultaneously disregarding, marginalizing, or actively undermining trans struggles and rights. A recurring feature of this frame is its alignment with liberal values—invoking scientific authority, rationality, cautious policymaking, and compassion—through which cisnormativity is rendered universal and self-evident. In what follows, I introduce the notion through two illustrative cases from the JA21 and the VVD.

During the parliamentary debate, Pouw-Verweij (JA21) asked the radical leftist party BIJ1 whether, given the absence of a third sex option, the Bill might risk reinforcing binary gender stereotypes: “I feel some tensions between saying that gender non-conforming behavior should be acceptable while the Bill is limited to offering legal recognition only of the opposite sex,” later adding: “In practice, we see parents who wish to accommodate their children in their social transition in the best way possible. When a young boy expresses his wish to live like a girl, the parents often rush into the gender-conforming behavior of the other gender.”

This passage again demonstrates how parties opposing the Bill mobilize liberal thought to challenge the Bill’s supporters. Here, compassion functions as a means of expressing the struggles of trans children and their parents. Such arguments do not directly attack trans people, but articulate a broader critique of the Bill, which I believe can be described as opportunistic. Recognizing that the JA21 adheres to a highly medicalized, if not pathologizing, understanding of sex and gender, this deployment of liberal thought operates to legitimize restrictive and essentialist views under the guise of reasoned concern, purported neutrality, and rational guarding of children’s wellbeing.

The second example comes from Ulysse Ellian of the VVD:

We must also stand up for the feelings of people who have concluded that the body they are in no longer matches how they feel. That feeling does not mean you have become a different kind of citizen in the Netherlands, with fewer rights, or that you are loved any less. Quite the opposite is true: you are loved, regardless of how you feel, and you have the same rights as anyone else. But is a feeling legally decisive? Put differently: should how someone feels, or thinks they feel, at any given moment be the determining factor, without those feelings being discussed?

As is expected from Dutch sexual politics, the VVD’s positioning clearly signals liberal inclusion and formal equality. Ellian underscores solidarity and affirms that personal feelings do not affect one’s legal status. At the same time, however, by asking whether “feelings are legally decisive,” he articulates a particular mode of gender contestation against individualized acts of self-identification. Put differently, this contestation excludes the complex interplay of biology, culture, materiality, language, and politics in understanding gender/sex (see also Täuber et al., 2025: 83). Such contestation, as a result, invokes registers of skepticism and delegitimization of trans struggles as a basis for legal recognition. While this is not expressed as an outright rejection, it is still a clear call for regulation and verification. ⁸

Before turning to the discussion, it is noteworthy to mention that Christian compassion has historically played a key role in driving change for trans people in the Netherlands (Bakker, 2021). Liberal cisnormativity, however, differs from Christian compassion in several important ways. First, it is grounded in Enlightenment rationalism and secular liberalism rather than religious moral traditions. Second, its tone tends to be reasoned, tolerant, and policy-oriented. Third, while Christian discourse often emphasizes family values and the so-called “Natural Order,” the concerns of liberal cisnormativity focus on free speech, fairness, and institutional integrity. That said, the two discourses are not mutually exclusive and frequently overlap.

Liberal cisnormativity and anti-gender politics

In my discussion, I turn to the analytical usefulness of liberal cisnormativity in relation to anti-gender politics. While this article draws substantially on studies concerning anti-gender politics, I came to realize during my research that using the anti-gender label as a totalizing descriptor of this article risks analytical overreach (see also Obst and Ablett, 2024), as critiques of gender and research on gender emerge from multiple ideological positions, including leftist perspectives. Such critiques, for example, interrogate the neoliberal turn in research on gender more widely (Risman et al., 2018) and draw attention to how European gender equality measures, contextualized within a wider process of Europeanization, are interconnected with the rise of anti-gender rhetoric in Poland (Rawłuszko, 2019). From such positions, both the Bill itself and its accompanying discursive justifications could be subject to examination, whether, for example, through the lens of trans materialist critique (Llaveria Caselles, 2023, 2025) or the neoliberal capture of politics (Simmons, 2023).

Scholarship on anti-gender politics critically engages with the conceptualization of the term anti-gender, which is found to be used to describe a wide range of phenomena with distinct and localized specificities (see e.g. Obst and Ablett, 2024). As such, anti-gender politics have been compared to the creature of Victor Frankenstein (Paternotte, 2023) and a hydra, a multi-headed monster (see Murray, 2022). A proposed response to this conceptual muddiness is to employ the term with “caution and reflexivity” (Roggeband et al., 2025: 2) and “conceptual openness” (Ojeda et al., 2024: 21).

In line with this awareness, my analysis suggests that what is being contested is not gender (equality) per se, but rather gender as an individualized act of self-identification (i.e. “a feeling”), whose institutional embedding, the argument goes, should be approached with caution. The various articulations tapping into this logic, invoking scientific evidence, compassion, and (to a degree) recognition of trans rights, appear to mainly oppose what is seen as an alternative belief system, one that simultaneously orchestrates “a sort of conspiracy aimed at seizing power and imposing deviant and minority values on average people” (Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017: 9). Importantly, this ideology is not portrayed as originating from trans people but from the academic, cultural, and political elite.

Considering the above, my analysis aligns most closely with the work of scholars who draw attention to the hegemonic dimension of anti-gender politics (see e.g. Grzebalska et al., 2017). In this sense, and I borrow this description from Kováts (2018: 535):

Gender provides the theatre for the struggle for hegemony in the Gramscian sense, and these mobilizations are rather the throes of a contest for redefining liberal democracy where ‘gender ideology’ embodies numerous deficits of the so-called progressive actors, and the adversaries of the concept react to these by re-politicizing certain issues in a polarized language.

In more concrete terms, a hegemonic struggle cannot be resolved through allegations of misinformation or more empirical evidence. Rather, these contestations stem from active intellectual efforts that produce alternative bodies of knowledge (Korolczuk, 2020). As exemplified by one commentary: “So there are two competing realities, the one of gender identity fights the biological one by trying to make it irrelevant” (NRC, 2022).

Now that we have a better understanding of anti-gender politics, I propose that the conceptual value of liberal cisnormativity lies in its ability to capture gender contestation rooted in normative assumptions about sex while simultaneously relying on the language of liberal thought. Such articulations may acknowledge the societal relevance of gender as an act of self-identification—and even recognize the oppressive dimensions of gender/sex roles and constrained forms of expression—yet they remain wary of what they frame as the ideological risks inherent in self-identification. In this way, liberal cisnormativity captures a form of contestation that upholds liberalism without fully disavowing gender.

Much like earlier descriptions of sexual politics, liberal cisnormativity upholds a certain notion of modernity while eluding pluralism (Butler, 2008). However, Butler’s (2008) description implies a certain problem of the time rooted in “hegemonic concepts of progress” (p. 1). In the context of the Bill, liberal cisnormativity is less used to characterize those deemed insufficiently modern, and more to target those who are seen as advancing the language of a different social order that is now being forcibly implemented.

To return to the possibility of an analytical overreach of the term anti-gender politics, if one acknowledges the “freakish” and boundary-crossing conceptualization of anti-gender politics, initiatives such as Gendertwijfel—which explicitly mobilize the expression of “gender ideology”—could more readily be understood as part of anti-gender politics. In this reading, the plasticity of anti-gender politics becomes visible in its articulation alongside Dutch sexual politics. However, how does this framework account for actors who instead point to a broader social movement, or who focus primarily on the perceived indeterminacy of gender within the administrative and legal apparatus?

Two reasonable conclusions can be formulated here. First, I believe that this risk is the result of the frequently assumed “coordinated” character of anti-gender “attacks” (Ojeda et al., 2024: 1), since this description may obscure how anti-gender rhetoric not only travels and adapts to local imaginaries, but can also be picked up by others who, like Butler (2024) has argued, have (consciously or not) entered the phantasmatic scene of gender. In this sense, anti-gender politics appear to evolve gradually into a decentralized political formation, in which previously coordinated efforts have diffused into a broader circulation of ideas. This can be grasped as cultural mainstreaming, which corresponds to Paternotte’s description of how “these campaigns have now assumed their own autonomous life; escaped, running wild and evolving, away from the [Catholic] laboratory from which they first emerged” (Corrêa et al., 2023: 490). After all, political parties such as the VVD and the CDA similarly contest gender by reducing it to something as simple as “feelings.” In doing so, they essentialize sex and, consequently, call into question the validity of trans experiences and struggles. This move implicitly reaffirms a hierarchical social order grounded in cisnormative assumptions where trans identities are understood as elective.

Second, one might ask whether this form of caution does not simply reflect responsible governance. While this is a fair question, one that has accompanied me throughout this study, it is important to consider the proposed law as well. The Bill has little international novelty, as several countries already allow for legal sex designation without an expert statement. Moreover, it does not interfere with the procedures or limits of trans care, and its ambitions remain relatively conservative, as it retains a strictly binary sex designation. Taken together, these features call for an analysis of the Bill’s contestation that accounts not only for overt resistance but also for more subtle or less conspicuous forms of contestation. The mixture of perceived danger, the fear of an ideology, and the perpetuation of a medicalized understanding of trans identity regulated by authorities such as state officials, bureaucrats, and public figures reveals some of the core characteristics of anti-gender politics.

Then, if we zoom out from the various meanings that aim to fix our understanding of gender, liberal cisnormativity might also challenge some of the overarching characteristics of anti-gender politics. Although many have argued that “anti-gender discourse facilitates the demonization of liberal democracy” (Korolczuk et al., 2025: 625), the Dutch debate on the Bill reveals how a seemingly liberal rhetorical device enables both the repudiation of the Bill and the simultaneous exposure of liberalism’s own inclusive limits (see Butler, 2008; Roggeband et al., 2025). In the context of this article, liberal cisnormativity does not so much oppose the “legacy of the Enlightenment” (Grzebalska et al., 2017, n.p.) but rather mobilizes it by offering a technocratic and rationalized articulation of gender that positions itself against the allegedly non-rational belief system associated with the Bill and its supporters.

As a final point, elements of liberal cisnormativity may surface in articulations that reference expressions such as “gender ideology,” but this is not a requirement. Given the scope of this article, further research is required to clarify whether liberal cisnormativity should be conceptualized as internal to anti-gender politics or whether its grammar may also exceed its “freakish” boundaries. This question ultimately depends on the scholarly consensus on the conceptual demarcation of anti-gender politics and its plasticity. I suggest that, particularly in contexts where gender is to some extent accepted as a relevant category, liberal cisnormativity may serve as a useful analytical tool for tracing forms of contestation that may appear less hostile yet still uphold exclusionary categories and institutional arrangements that delimit the recognition and legibility of trans identities.

Conclusion

This article has sought to examine the contestation of the Dutch Transgender Bill of 2021, exploring how meanings of gender/sex are locally constructed and contested, and to suggest how these constructions and contestations might relate to a broader framework of anti-gender politics. Drawing on FCDA, I have analyzed articulations through which “gender ideologies that entrench power asymmetries become ‘common sense’ within particular communities and discursive contexts” (Lazar, 2017: 372).

I have coined the notion of liberal cisnormativity to draw attention to a type of gender contestation rooted in normative assumptions about sex while simultaneously relying on the language of liberal thought. This partial recognition of gender, I posit, simultaneously reinforces further essentialization of sex, endowing cisness with epistemic legitimacy, while dismissing or downplaying critical insights into the body as complex, contingent, and dynamic—“the mess of sex” in the words of Velocci (2026: 2).

The rhetoric of liberal cisnormativity thus universalizes cisness while simultaneously disavowing the persistent scientific incoherence that accompanies attempts to fixate the category of sex, thereby undermining and marginalizing trans experiences and struggles (see e.g. Fausto-Sterling, 2000, 2012; Joel, 2012). In contexts where gender is to some degree accepted as a legitimate category, such an analytical lens can be particularly valuable for understanding how gender contestation persist, cloaked in language of liberal thought while simultaneously revealing its exclusionary potential (see also Brown, 2019; Butler, 2008; Roggeband et al., 2025).

Returning to the question of anti-gender politics, further research is needed to determine whether liberal cisnormativity should be understood as internal to it. While liberal cisnormativity can be situated as a distinct dimension of Dutch sexual politics, its precise relation to anti-gender politics ultimately depends on how far scholarly consensus will extend the claim that anti-gender formations are conceptually plastic. What this study demonstrates, however, is that not all invocations of “gender ideology” should be automatically categorized as overtly illiberal or reactionary.

As a final remark, I align with the feminist critique on the worn-out usage of the categories of sex and gender existing in an antagonistic relationship to one another, where sex is quarantined from the social and gender from biology (Hemmings, 2022), culturally evolving gender into something as simple as an individual declaration of identity. In times when biology and science have become weaponized as something outside the cultural matrix of power relations, stripped of their scholarly complexities and reduced to a source of disruption, gender appears to have become the frontier of a hegemonic struggle.