Editor's Note: This article first appeared in Dutch on the platform Gereformeerd Venster.
The new Trump administration has now been in office in the United States for a few months, with many welcome developments. In the Netherlands, the broadcaster Ongehoord Nederland is being criminally prosecuted for excluding job applicants who have stated their gender as “X”. In the United States, on the other hand, the Trump team is going all out to stop transgender treatment, and the promotion of transgenderism, through several pieces of secondary legislation. In this article, I seek to provide an overview of interesting cases arising from White House documents. In the second half of the below article, I will address the question of why, on the contrary, the Netherlands is in favour of transgenderism.
Combating Gender Ideology
A presidential decree (known in the US as an Executive Order) of 20 January 2025 on Defending Women from Gender Ideology and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government lays down the following: “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality”. The Executive Order states that sex refers to the condition of being either male or female and has nothing to do with the concept of gender identity, a notion which assumes that people decide for themselves whether they are male or female, regardless of their biological sex. The decree acknowledges that women are biologically different from men. Within the US government, the word "sex" must henceforth be used, not the word "gender". In addition, federal agencies are ordered to stop promoting gender ideology.
Protecting Children from Mutilation
The Executive Order Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation of 28 January 2025 states,
Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.
The decree applies to children up to the age of 18. President Trump promises in this order that the United States will not fund, support or promote the so-called transition of a child from one sex to the other. All laws prohibiting these “destructive and life-altering” procedures will be strictly enforced. A week later, Trump reported that hospitals across the country are taking actions to reduce or end transgender treatments.
Countering Radical Indoctrination in Schools
Another Executive Order (29 January 2025) seeks to curb “radical indoctrination” in elementary and high schools. This includes education based on gender ideology and “discriminatory equity ideology”.
Halting Diversity Programmes
Pursuant to another Executive Order of 20 January 2025, DEI programmes within the federal government will be terminated. These programmes promote diversity, equity, and inclusion for groups such as the LGBTQ community and ensure preferential treatment for such groups. In their place, the Trump administration states that it is restoring workplace values such as individual dignity, hard work and promotion by merit.
Removing Men from Women’s Sports
On 5 February 2025, Trump signed the Executive Order Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports, excluding from women’s sports competitions and women’s changing rooms biological men who act as women after transitioning. According to the US President, the situation whereby trans women mix with biological women is “demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls, and denies women and girls the equal opportunity to participate and excel in competitive sports”.
Countering LGBTQ Funding
Meanwhile, the Оne Flag Policy stipulates that the rainbow flag can no longer be raised on US State Department buildings. The US Government has also recently been dismantling the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). According to a White House factsheet, that federal agency has wasted and misused huge sums of money allocated to overseas development projects on gender initiatives, transgender propaganda, LGBTQ activism, and contraceptives.
US Developments Summarised
In summary, President Trump has fired quite a few arrows at the letter T of the gender alphabet in the space of a few weeks. This has immediately made a big splash in US society, both inside and beyond US Government organisations. According to Dutch state broadcaster NOS, companies such as Meta, Walmart, McDonald’s, Amazon, and supermarket chain Target are also doing away with diversity policies in anticipation of trouble if they persist with them. Restrictions are also being removed on Facebook and Instagram, as described by NOS journalist Stan Hulsen: “For example, the new policy explicitly states that it is permissible to describe transgender people or homosexuals as ‘mentally ill’ or ‘abnormal’”.
Meanwhile, some judges are also seeking to block Trump’s Executive Orders. For example, a federal judge has banned the Government from implementing the decree on ending gender-affirming care for minors. As a result of developments in the United States, the transgender movement is losing considerable territory further afield. In Russia, too, the position of the transgender movement is weak. Yet in Europe, governments are still trying to peddle this ideology. This makes Europe an island between the United States and Russia in terms of transgender ideology.
Why Is the Netherlands Not Following US Policy?
In the Netherlands, the Government still supports and promotes transgenderism. But what is the logic of this policy, since transition treatments are very invasive for patients? For clarity, we should outline the issue. Gender dysphoria is a mental illness characterised by the feeling of pertaining to the opposite sex (see, for instance, in Dutch, Sophie Dechêne’s work ‘Genderdysforie vanuit medisch perspectief’, in the 2024 book Het gender-experiment: Hoe maakbaar is onze identiteit als M/V/X?) To solve this mental problem, people have taken to getting themselves physically adapted from the male to the female sex and vice versa. Specifically, this means maiming healthy genitals, posing great risks to fertility. Moreover, the symptoms of gender dysphoria in many children are not real; they are rather, as I have previously described, the result of “social contagion”. The Dutch Government and special interest groups are pushing through so-called “trans rights” and effectively demanding that the public start applauding this transgender lifestyle. Many trans people walk in parades with transgender pride flags to celebrate their lifestyle. Pretty crazy, actually. So what is the logic behind it?
No Parades Or Flags for People with Vertigo
By way of comparison, there are many in the Netherlands who suffer from vertigo, a mental disorder also known as acrophobia. There is a certain logic to fear of heights, as it can be dangerous to move around high up. However, we would find it absurd if acrophobes started organising parades and walking around with acrophobic pride flags. Nor can we imagine the government acceding to such a group’s demands in like manner by setting about the demolition of flat blocks and allowing only low-rise projects from now on.
A Matter of Agency?
Many may think that transgenderism is being supported in recognition of the importance of agency or empowerment—people’s right to make their own choices about their own lives. From the point of view of grassroots trans activists, such a notion is understandable. But then, why is no-one actually allowed to have trans regret? Surely, those who wish to reverse their transition have agency? We see the same with abortion and homosexuality, actually. Regretting an abortion is taboo, as is getting cold feet about being gay. Most non-Christian political parties in the Netherlands even vehemently oppose any form of so-called conversion therapy, as I have previously written about.
Other Motives
So why is transgenderism so forcefully promoted? Well, we should bear in mind that transgender activism is closely bound up with queer theory, a revolutionary doctrine that (as I have previously written) rejects altogether the categories of male and female and opposes heterosexuality as the norm, so that it is a mindset running completeley contrary to the norms that God has given us. In addition, there are huge financial interests involved in the transgender industry, which Lidwien Jansen described in the Dutch sceptical newspaper Gezond Verstand (9 December 2020 issue) as a “perpetual cash machine”. Once taken on as a patient, transgender people remain that industry’s customers for life.
Population Policy?
And what of the role here of the long-standing policy of avoiding supposed overpopulation? Frederick S. Jaffe (1925-1978), who was Vice-President of Planned Parenthood in 1969, compiled a comprehensive catalogue of options to combat population growth. In that overview, known as the Jaffe Memo (which I have previously covered), he listed abortion and homosexuality as remedies. It is not much of a push to extrapolate that to a policy of promoting transgenderism. The result is the same in each case: fewer children are born. Not surprisingly, the abortion-pushing organisation Planned Parenthood, and its umbrella organisation IPPF, have been defenders of sexual rights for homosexuals and transgender people for years.
Gratitude
Whatever the real motive of the Dutch government regarding transgenderism, we are seeing great things from the new Trump administration on this issue. This is something we can thank God for. In the previous issue of Gereformeerd Venster, we wrote that abortion is being vigorously opposed. In the present article, we have seen that transgenderism is taking a big hit. This is a matter of rejoicing for those who take the Bible seriously. After all, Genesis 1:27 says: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them”. May the Lord grant that this message also be taken seriously in the Netherlands.
