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

Transgender athletes do not belong in women's or girls' competitions, US President Donald Trump decided yesterday. Late last year, Dutch anthropologist and journalist Sybilla Claus wrote a critical book entitled 'Gender Rebels' about the victim culture that, according to her, is linked to gender ideology. 'Are you a young woman and do you want to matter on social media? Then in 2024, you had better be transgender. And yes, a breast amputation also earns extra points.'

Interview: Filip Michiels

Where did this book come from?

Sybilla Claus: 'I want to shake awake the large group of people who barely realise what is happening today. For the sake of clarity: I have absolutely nothing against young people who identify as trans, but I do oppose the deranged activism of gender ideology. It is a dismantling of women's rights. Often it involves very young girls who end up in a sort of online trap, but I stand up just as much for young lesbian women who are increasingly asked if they actually don't want to be men after all. Or for women in sports or in prisons who suddenly see a man with a penis appear next to them in the shower, because he supposedly feels like a woman.'

'You easily get the impression these days that more and more people describe themselves as non-binary, and that enormous numbers of girls want to transition and have their breasts removed. That is of course not the case, but a number of them do receive a disproportionate amount of attention. I am thinking, for example, of Rikkie Kolle, who last year became the first man to identify as a woman to be crowned Miss Netherlands. Or Maxim Februari, a woman who now lives as a man and who received the PC Hooft Prize in 2020, based on a fairly limited oeuvre overall. The BBC has just named a man Sportswoman of the Year. The media tend to look for exceptions and to magnify certain phenomena, thereby presenting us with a distorted picture of reality.'

In your book, you point an accusing finger at what you call victim culture. This not only plays a major role in the exaggerated media attention given to trans people, but has also become all-determining on social media. All forms of victimhood or mental health issues are a plus there, and transgender people rank at the very top?

'In my book, a young woman describes the kinds of things you have to put in your online bio to score well. Victimhood – from ADHD and a different ethnic background to eating disorders – earns you quite a few extra points anyway, but for some reason, being trans actually scores the highest number of points. Anyone who is simply white and straight usually ends up at the very bottom of the online ranking. Depending on the number of points you have in that ranking, your opinion counts more.'

It gets completely crazy when you see an Instagram account like Queers for Palestine pop up, which is particularly popular today. Or slogans like Queers for Hamas. As if those girls even have the faintest idea what Hamas actually stands for. Let alone that they can gauge what would happen to them if they had to live under Hamas.

Yet we live in an era and in a country where your gender is presented as a personal choice. Never before has it been so easy to escape the 'constricting oppression' of your sex, right?

'I completely agree with you on that: nowhere are transgender people supported and welcomed with such 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 smart is debatable. But it is—as psychologists keep telling us—contagious: especially online, something like this quickly becomes a trend. For teenage girls who are easily glued to their screens for six hours a day, all those online platforms and communities function as a kind of megaphone. Hence the conclusion of my book: thirty years ago, it was much easier for teenage girls and young women to be or become themselves.'

Being transgender is 'in', but is there a lobby or a sophisticated strategy behind the sharply increased number of gender transitions in Western Europe and the US?

'Absolutely, particularly with regard to various subsidy streams. Recently, I received another press release suggesting that discrimination against transgender people in the Netherlands had increased tenfold. Well, I'll be damned, nowhere is deviant behavior so widely accepted as in the Netherlands. I myself was a member of the COC for years, the oldest advocacy group for homosexuals, lesbians, and bisexuals in the Netherlands. If you read their annual report today, the term "trans" appears 45 times, and the word "lesbian" exactly three times. It seems as if, once same-sex marriage had been legalized, activists had to look for new target groups.'

'It reminds me somewhat of development organizations, which find themselves forced every year to find new projects or target groups to continue securing a stream of funding. Even Amnesty International is now suddenly talking about "trans rights," even though such a thing obviously does not exist; everyone has human rights at birth.'

You interviewed quite a few girls for this book and found that a growing group of teenage girls harbours a desire to no longer be girls. They are deeply unhappy with the stereotypical female role, want to escape from their bodies, and view gender dysphoria as an escape route. That goes really far.

'I can still relate to that desire. I had it myself when I was that age: you want to get out of that body. Girls are getting their first periods earlier and earlier, they often develop breasts when they are barely 11 or 12, and suddenly notice that they are being judged for that too. At that age, they are also particularly vulnerable and impressionable.'

'To make matters worse, they also grow up in a society where transition is glorified. This goes very far: in the Netherlands, it will soon even become a criminal offense to ask teenage girls who are struggling with their sexual identity and considering gender reassignment surgery whether they might not simply have lesbian feelings. Nor are therapists allowed to warn their young patients about the often horrific complications of gender reassignment surgery. On the contrary, mutilating mastectomies are now glorified, even within the medical world. Sometimes even in fun TikTok videos by figures like the young doctor Teetus Deletus, who make it seem as if it is all nothing.'

'The explosion of unhappy teenage girls who want to become "men" should prompt medical professionals to exercise the utmost caution, not least because social contagion among girls of that age is a known sociological phenomenon. Furthermore, it is known that lesbian women often already deviated from traditional gender stereotypes as girls.'

Is there a real business model behind that approach from the medical perspective?

Absolutely. A double mastectomy easily costs 10,000 euros, and in the Netherlands, health insurance simply reimburses that. There have been waiting lists at the so-called gender clinics for years; it has become a solid business with irreversible medical procedures performed on young people with an immature brain.

How many men or women transition in the Netherlands today?

That is a good question. We tried for months to get figures on that from the Ministry of Health. For example: exactly how many breast or penile amputations are we talking about on an annual basis? Well, we never received those figures; it turned out they had no overview.

'I fear that there is also a great deal of ignorance within politics, and in my view, this is part of a deliberate strategy by the trans movement. And needless to say: as a politician today, you are only considered decent if you take the most progressive positions possible. The transgender lobby is piggybacking on the success of the gay movement and is now forcing all kinds of rights under the radar for men who suddenly start identifying as women. Two men win Olympic gold for women; can it get any crazier? Women's sport originated – and was initially even fiercely contested – simply because significant biological differences exist between men and women.'

The irony of the story is, of course, that the Left and the feminist movement have strived for equal women's rights and less discrimination for decades. Today, they must acknowledge that gender ideology going too far actually leads to more discrimination against women.

'From our feminist framework, we believe in the ideal of a malleable society, but today we are living through the era of the malleable individual. And now we must indeed acknowledge that many bodies and institutions that have dedicated themselves to women's emancipation for decades have suddenly switched to the discourse of self-identification. Anyone who disagrees with this is kicked out. Some feminists go along with this, but a part of the feminist movement also seems to be gradually turning to resistance and speaking out more strongly against the erosion of women's rights.'

Thousands of girls talk each other into things online, and white girls in particular are very susceptible in that regard.

The main argument on the left in the entire gender debate is that 'everyone should be able to make autonomous choices'? You don't believe that?

'I have no objection to adults making certain choices, but for minors it is a completely different story. A child's brain continues to develop until you are 25, and that is precisely why we don't let children drive cars, for example, or don't allow them to drink. But amputating the breasts of a seventeen-year-old or having ten-year-olds take puberty blockers – that is not a problem, then?'

However, there is growing scientific evidence that these puberty blockers are much more than just a kind of pause button. For example, they lead to osteoporosis and contribute to your sexuality developing much less or not at all, with all the dramatic consequences for your future life. But 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 vice versa?

'Absolutely. Girls make up a clear majority of 80 percent on the waiting lists for Dutch gender clinics, and this is also the case internationally. The interviews I conducted for the book show that young girls adopt each other's feelings very quickly, perhaps because they often show more empathy than boys. Thousands of girls influence each other online, and white girls in particular are very susceptible in that regard.'

Your book also shows that the vast majority of men who identify as women simply keep their penises. While girls do convince each other online to have their breasts amputated, and thus join 'the club'?

'Within that group of men who feel like women, you also have different subcategories. You have that limited group of very handsome men who call themselves women and who often make it into the media or even become Miss Netherlands. But at the other end of the spectrum, you also have a group of somewhat older, often downright unsavoury men with a beer belly. They get aroused by dressing as women or by visiting women's changing rooms or restrooms and making videos there. They, too, are now happily profiting from the whole gender craze.'

'Or consider this: in the US and the UK, there are already hundreds of men in women's prisons today who claim to be women. Among them are a few rapists. In England, too, there is a man in his fifties who plays football on a women's team. Great fun, of course, afterwards in the showers. Last but not least: there are also terrible men who portray themselves as proud lesbians. In other words: the door to abuse and rape is wide open. But then again, the political establishment is naturally happily cooperating with this, knowing that since November 1st in Germany you can simply walk into town hall to say that you feel like a woman and therefore want to change gender. Such a bill is now also in the works in the Netherlands; hopefully, we can still put a stop to it.'

This interview appeared in the print version of late 2024. Breakthrough Magazine.

Read here the version with our Flemish neighbours (February 2025)