The Dutch executive in functions apologized this Saturday, on behalf of the governments that applied between 1985 and 2014 the transgender law that forced people who wanted to change their gender identity to undergo an operation and to be irreversibly sterilized.
The Dutch Minister of Education and Culture, Ingrid Van Engelshoven, offered the apology and stressed that the victims, transgender and intersex, will receive a compensation of 5,000 euros for the damage caused by having been forced to choose between living with a genre that did not coincide with Your identity, or undergo surgery and lifelong sterilization.
Van Engelshoven considered "dehumanizing" these requirements and explained that "for decades, there have been people who underwent medical treatments that did not want at all, but that they knew that was his only option" to be themselves, while "others have opted to wait because of this law, and they have been forced to postpone their conversion for years. "
One of the victims of that law, Willemijn Van Kempen, was the first to demand in 2019 that apologizes, a recognition of damage caused and compensation for having given him an "impossible election" in the eighties, when he made his conversion. "The state started the fertility," she denounced on statements to public television.
The Netherlands Network of Transgender People (TNN) ensures that, at least since 1995, more than 1,200 people have been victims of this rule, although the Ministry of Education and Science estimates that some 2,000 people will be entitled to compensation.
Miriam van Der Have, director of the organization for sexual diversity (NNID), held that the executive takes the step of apologizing, but regretted that this also "opens old wounds that are not easy to close with apologies or a sum of money ".
He discovered at 19 who is an intersexual: he had XY chromosomes and a woman's body, but was registered as a child at birth. To reassign the genre of it, she had to go through the operating room, an operation that was beyond what she had wanted, she says.
"In the end I woke up without clitoris, I was deprived of the opportunity to have sexual pleasure, I'm still angry about that, it is very strong not to have known sexual pleasure for 35 years because I have eliminated my nerves," said this victim, who has State today in the official act headed by the minister.
Victims were not allowed to preserve genetic material in order to have children eventually after sterilization.
The Dutch Government, also led by the Liberal Mark Rutte, modified in 2014 the Transgender Law because he considered that he violated human rights.
It abolished the requirement of mandatory sterilization and facilitated the possibility of changing gender in a birth certificate, which led to an increase in the number of people who officially changed gender in their identity documents.
Date Of Update: 27 November 2021, 21:02
