Interview in the Belgian newspaper Doorbraak: the 'door to abuse' is wide open

Transgender athletes have no place in women's or girls' competitions, US President Donald Trump declared yesterday. Late last year the Dutch anthropologist and journalist Sybilla Claus published a critical book, 'Gender Rebels', about the victim culture that, in her view, is intertwined with gender ideology. 'If you're a young woman and you want to be noticed on social media, then in 2024 you had better be transgender. And yes, a breast amputation earns you extra points.'

Interview: Filip Michiels

Where did this book come from?

Sybilla Claus: 'I want to shake awake the large group of people who scarcely realise what is going on today. To be perfectly clear: I have nothing whatsoever against young people who identify as trans, but I am firmly opposed to the unhinged activism of gender ideology. It amounts to a dismantling of women's rights. Often it involves very young girls who fall into a kind of online trap, but I am just as ready to stand up for young lesbian women who are now routinely asked whether they wouldn't really rather be men. Or for women in sport, or in prison, who suddenly find a man with a penis standing next to them in the shower because he claims to feel like a woman.'

'You could easily get the impression these days that more and more people are describing themselves as non-binary, and that vast numbers of girls want to transition and have their breasts removed. That is not the case, of course, but a small number of them attract a wildly disproportionate amount of attention. I am thinking, for example, of Rikkie Kollé, who last year became the first man identifying as a woman to be crowned Miss Netherlands. Or Maxim Februari, a woman now living as a man, who was awarded the PC Hooft Prize in 2020 on the basis of a fairly slender oeuvre. The BBC has just named a man Sportswoman of the Year. The media have a tendency to seek out exceptions and to magnify particular phenomena, and so present us with a distorted picture of reality.'

In your book you point an accusing finger at what you call victim culture. It plays a substantial part not only in the inflated media coverage of trans people, but has also become all-pervading on social media. Every form of victimhood, every kind of mental health issue, is a plus there, and trans people sit right at the top of the pile?

'In my book, a young woman describes the sorts of things you need to put in your online bio in order to score well. Victimhood — from ADHD and a non-Western background to eating disorders — already earns you a fair number of extra points, but for some reason being trans scores highest of all. Anyone who happens to be white and straight tends to end up at the very bottom of the online pecking order. The more points you have in that ranking, the more weight your opinion is given.'

It becomes utterly absurd when you come across an Instagram account such as Queers for Palestine, which is particularly popular at the moment. Or slogans like Queers for Hamas. As if those girls have the faintest idea what Hamas actually stands for, let alone any sense of what would happen to them if they ever had to live under it.

And yet we live in an era, and in a country, where your gender is presented as a personal choice. It has never been easier to escape the 'suffocating oppression' of your sex, has it?

'I quite agree with you there: nowhere are transgender people supported and welcomed with quite the same enthusiasm as in the Western world, and it has never been easier to walk into a hospital and have something done to your body. Whether that is actually wise is another matter. But this sort of thing is — as psychologists keep reminding us — contagious: online especially, it quickly becomes a trend. For teenage girls who spend six hours a day glued to a screen, all those platforms and communities act as a kind of megaphone. Hence the conclusion of my book: thirty years ago, it was a great deal easier for teenage girls and young women to be, or to become, themselves.'

Being transgender is 'in', but is there a lobby or a carefully crafted strategy behind the sharp rise in gender transitions across Western Europe and the US?

'Most certainly, particularly when it comes to the various streams of public funding. Only the other day I received yet another press release suggesting that discrimination against transgender people in the Netherlands had risen tenfold. Well, I'll be hanged: nowhere is non-conformity so widely accepted as in the Netherlands. I was myself a member of COC for many years — the oldest advocacy organisation for gay, lesbian and bisexual people in the Netherlands. Read their annual report today and the term "trans" appears 45 times, the word "lesbian" exactly three. It is as though, once same-sex marriage had been secured, activists had to cast about for new target groups.'

'It rather reminds me of development organisations, which find themselves obliged each year to identify new projects or new target groups in order to keep the funding flowing. Even Amnesty International now suddenly talks about "trans rights", though no such thing exists; every human being is born with human rights.'

You interviewed a good many girls for this book and found that a growing number of teenage girls long to be something other than girls. They are deeply unhappy with the stereotypical female role, want to escape their bodies, and treat gender dysphoria as a way out. That is going a very long way.

'I can still recognise that impulse. I felt it myself at that age: you want to get out of that body. Girls are starting their periods earlier and earlier, they often develop breasts at barely 11 or 12, and they suddenly find themselves being judged for that too. At that age, they are also exceptionally vulnerable and impressionable.'

'To make matters worse, they are growing up in a society that glorifies transition. It goes a long way: in the Netherlands it will soon be a criminal offence to ask teenage girls struggling with their sexual identity, and contemplating gender reassignment surgery, whether they might not in fact simply have lesbian feelings. Nor will therapists be permitted to warn their young patients about the often horrific complications of such surgery. On the contrary: mutilating mastectomies are now glamorised, even within the medical world. Sometimes even in jolly TikTok videos by figures such as the young doctor Teetus Deletus, who make the whole thing look like a lark.'

'The explosion in unhappy teenage girls who want to become "men" ought to be prompting medical professionals to exercise the utmost caution, not least because social contagion among girls of that age is a well-documented sociological phenomenon. It is also well known that lesbian women often departed from traditional gender stereotypes already as girls.'

Is there a genuine business model behind this approach on the medical side?

Absolutely. A double mastectomy easily runs to 10,000 euros, and in the Netherlands health insurance simply reimburses it. There have been waiting lists at the so-called gender clinics for years; it has become a thriving business, with irreversible medical procedures being performed on young people whose brains have not yet matured.

How many men or women transition in the Netherlands today?

That is a good question. We spent months trying to extract the figures from the Ministry of Health. How many breast or penile amputations are we actually talking about each year, for instance? Well, we never received those figures; as it turned out, the ministry had no overview at all.

'I suspect there is also a great deal of ignorance within politics, and in my view that is part of a deliberate strategy on the part of the trans movement. And needless to say, you are only considered a decent politician today if you take the most progressive possible positions. The transgender lobby is piggybacking on the success of the gay movement and is now pushing through, under the radar, all manner of rights for men who have suddenly begun identifying as women. Two men winning Olympic gold in the women's competition — can it get any more absurd? Women's sport came into being — and was initially fiercely resisted — for the simple reason that there are significant biological differences between men and women.'

The irony of the story is, of course, that the left and the feminist movement have spent decades fighting for equal rights and against discrimination against women. Today they have to acknowledge that gender ideology pushed too far is in fact producing more discrimination against women.

'In our feminist tradition we believe in the ideal of a malleable society, but today we are living through the era of the malleable individual. And we now have to acknowledge that many of the bodies and institutions which dedicated themselves to women's emancipation for decades have, almost overnight, switched to the discourse of self-identification. Anyone who disagrees is thrown out. Some feminists go along with this, but a part of the feminist movement does appear to be slowly turning, and now speaks out more forcefully against the erosion of women's rights.'

Thousands of girls talk one another into things online, and white girls in particular are highly susceptible.

The main argument on the left, throughout the whole gender debate, is that 'everyone should be able to make autonomous choices'. You don't accept that?

'I have no objection to adults making certain choices, but for minors it is an entirely different matter. The child's brain goes on developing until you are 25, which is precisely why we don't allow children to drive cars or to drink alcohol. But amputating the breasts of a seventeen-year-old, or putting ten-year-olds on puberty blockers — that's somehow not a problem?'

What's more, there is mounting scientific evidence that these puberty blockers are a great deal more than a simple pause button. They cause osteoporosis, for instance, and stunt or prevent the development of sexuality, with all the dramatic consequences for one's later life. Yet all of this is cheerfully swept under the carpet.

You focus exclusively on girls in your book: are there really so many more girls who want to become boys than the other way round?

'Indeed there are. Girls account for a clear 80 per cent majority on the waiting lists at Dutch gender clinics, and the same pattern holds internationally. The interviews I conducted for the book show that young girls take on one another's feelings remarkably quickly, perhaps because they tend to be more empathetic than boys. Thousands of girls influence one another online, and white girls in particular are highly susceptible to this.'

Your book also shows that the vast majority of men who identify as women simply keep their penises. Whereas girls do talk one another into having their breasts amputated online, and so 'joining the club'?

'Within that group of men who feel like women, there are several subcategories. There is the small group of very good-looking men who call themselves women and who often end up in the media, or are even crowned Miss Netherlands. But at the other end of the spectrum there is also a group of somewhat older, often frankly seedy men with beer bellies, who get a sexual kick out of dressing as women, or out of going into women's changing rooms and lavatories and filming themselves there. They, too, are now profiting nicely from the whole gender craze.'

'Or consider this: in the US and the UK there are already hundreds of men in women's prisons who claim to be women. Among them are several rapists. In England, too, there is a man in his fifties playing football in a women's team. Great fun, of course, afterwards in the showers. Last but not least, there are also appalling men who present themselves as proud lesbians. In short: the door to abuse and rape stands wide open. And the political establishment is, of course, happily going along with it, in the knowledge that since 1 November in Germany you can simply walk into the town hall to say that you feel like a woman and therefore wish to change your gender. A similar bill is now in the works in the Netherlands; with luck, we may still be able to stop it.'

This interview appeared in the print edition of Doorbraak Magazine, late 2024.

Read the version published for our Flemish neighbours (February 2025) here.