As the U. S. slides backwards on LGBTQ rights, the Netherlands has banned conversion therapy – for both sexual orientation and gender identity.
Dutch legislators voted on Tuesday, June 16, to outlaw conversation therapy, the latest country to regulate the practice after Brussels failed to implement an EU-wide ban earlier this year.
“You are not sick. You are not wrong. You do not need to be changed,” legislator Wieke Paulusma said after the 57-15 vote, calling the move a “historic” victory for the LGBTQ+ community.
The move makes the Netherlands the ninth country in Europe to ban attempts to change a person’s sexual orientation or their gender identity.
Campaigners behind a European Citizens’ Initiative, which lets voters petition Brussels directly, got 1.2 million signatures on a petition to ban conversion practices targeting the LGBTQ+ community earlier this year.
In May, the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, only adopted a recommendation to call on countries to ban the practice, not a full-fledged ban.
“While it is appreciated that the European Commission condemns and calls for a ban on these practices, this falls short of the urgency required,” Mattéo Garguilo, the 22-year old activist who along with several friends launched the campaign, said after Brussels announced its decision.
The Netherlands has now joined Malta, Germany, France, Greece, Spain, Belgium, Cyprus, and Portugal in forbidding healthcare workers and counselors from encouraging adults and children to change their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Research by the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency found that nearly a quarter of LGBTIQ+ people across the 27-member bloc had been subjected to some form of conversation therapy in their lifetimes.
Paulusma’s center-left D66 party, along with five others, first introduced a bill to outlaw conversation therapy in 2022, but the legislation hit a number of political and legal roadblocks. The Dutch Council of State, which must weigh in on the legal consequences of proposed legislation, advised against the bill, saying it ran contrary to freedom of religion.
Rob Jetten, then a D66 parliament member, called conversation therapy “cruel, traumatic, and completely unnecessary” when the bill was submitted. Now Jetten is the country’s first openly gay prime minister.
The Dutch lower house passed an amended bill in 2025, which focused on prolonged and systematic treatments.
According to COC, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group in the Netherlands, there are at least fifteen providers of conversion therapy practices in the country, which include everything from workshops to exorcisms.
The group has been pushing for a national ban for fifteen years. “Finally clarity: ‘cure’ is a myth, you are good as you are, and attempts at ‘cure’ are prohibited and punishable,” COC’s chairperson Myrtille Danse said following the vote.
Some practices, like shock treatment and certain medications for conversation therapy, had already been outlawed. In 2012, the Netherlands stopped requiring health care companies to reimburse for conversion therapy practices.
Practitioners who continue in spite of the new law face 27,500 euros ($32,000) and a prison sentence of up to two years. They can also have their professional licenses revoked.
Critics say that in practice, the law will be difficult to apply. Peter Schalk of the conservative Christian SGP party argued that the bill did not clearly define the line between a therapy practice and someone offering advice. “The boundary of oppressiveness” is not clear,” he said during a debate over the bill.
In an interview ahead of the vote, Schalk complained in particular about the ban on gender identity conversion. “A 16-year-old is allowed to choose to go in a different direction by using puberty blockers, hormone blockers, and so on. But you are not allowed to say at the same age: I want to go the other way,” he said.
LGBTQ+ activist Jacques Zonne told regional news broadcaster Omroep Gelderland that his “dream has turned into law.”
Zonne has been fighting against conversion therapy for decades, after he was subjected to the practice beginning in the 1970s. He grew up in a conservative Christian family in an area of the Netherlands known as the Bible Belt, a north to south strip with a high concentration of conservative orthodox Reformed Protestants.
In a 2012 documentary about his experience, he describes having his passport taken away and having his every move surveilled after he entered a conversion center. The now 74-year old eventually escaped, moved to Amsterdam and began speaking out about what happened to him.
Zonne said his work is not yet done and that he intends to pick up his advocacy at the EU level again when campaigners will make another attempt to pass legislation later this year.
Molly Quell is a Dutch-American journalist based in The Hague, Netherlands. She was previously with the Associated Press and her work has appeared in the Guardian, the Economist, and Mother Jones.
