When kindness becomes cruelty

Affirmative school policies are sold as friendly, inclusive, and safe. In practice, they reinforce children's idea that their bodies are wrong. A Dutch adaptation.

The trick of the word "friendly"

Affirmative gender policy rests on one word: friendly. Friendly to affirm the student in a trans identity. Friendly to use new pronouns. Friendly to facilitate social transition. Anyone who opposes the policy is automatically labeled unfriendly — a transphobe, a danger, a hateful person.

That framing is the entire policy. Remove the framing and you are left with something else: a school that reinforces a child's belief that his body is wrong. That is not kindness. That is complicity in harm.

Four ways in which the policy causes damage

1. Ideology as fact to five-year-olds

From Group 1 onwards, children hear that you can be born in the wrong body. Not as a story, not as a perspective — as the truth. A five-year-old has no tools to question that. What the teacher says is true. The result: children learn to sincerely believe that you can be born in the wrong body.

2. Parents sidelined

The policy enables schools to facilitate a child's social transition without informing the parents. In doing so, the school assumes the role of practitioner — without qualification, without clinical supervision, without responsibility. And without the people who know the child best.

3. Road safety

When a boy who says he feels like a girl gains access to the girls' restroom, the girls' locker room, and the girls' team—the safety of girls is sacrificed for his identity claim. That is not inclusion. That is a hierarchy in which the boy claiming identity is placed above all girls.

4. Medical normalization

School materials mention puberty blockers and hormones as if they are options children can calmly consider, not as medical interventions with major, partly irreversible consequences. Unqualified staff talk about treatments that doctors worldwide are turning back from — England, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway.

Social transition is no small matter

Research shows that the vast majority of children who socially transition remain in transition — not because it was the right choice, but because the social transition itself fixes the identity. It is not a reversible "trying it out". It is the first step of a trajectory.

Who is worse off because of this

• The child who would otherwise have gone through a phase and outgrown it.
• The gay youth who should have learned to accept that he is not "in the wrong body" but is simply gay.
• The autistic teenager who seeks an explanation for his otherness in the identity narrative.
• All the girls whose private spaces are now open to whoever claims them.
• All teachers who remain silent because they want to keep their jobs.

What so-called kindness really is

Genuine kindness towards a confused child: reassuring the child that his body is good. That a boy who likes pink is still a boy. That a girl who prefers playing soccer is still a girl. That gender stereotypes are not binding — but sex is.

Affirmative policy does the opposite. It says: yes, your feeling is right, you are in the wrong body, let's do something about it. That is not kindness. That is leading a child into a trap.

Conclusion

A school that adopts an affirmative policy believes it is being kind. It is complicit in iatrogenic harm. The policy must go. The words "kind" and "inclusive" should no longer serve as a defense for a practice that produces children who will take hormones for the rest of their lives.