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Jilles Smids vs. transgender people

Jilles Smids is a Dutch philosopher and anti-transgender activist. Smids is affiliated with SPLC-designated anti-trans hate group Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine.

Background

Smids earned a master’s degree from Utrecht University. Smids’ doctoral dissertation was on the ethics of behavior change technology.

According to a profile. Smids teaches medical ethics and academic competencies. In addition, Smids co-coordinates and teaches in the Minor Ethics and Innovation in Healthcare. Smids’ reported main research topic is “the ethical questions around new cancer therapies that are (temporarily) deemed insufficiently cost-effective for reimbursement under national health insurance.”

Anti-trans activism

Smids has published several articles with other anti-trans activists, most notably Moti Gorin.

In a piece by anti-trans activist Frieda Klotz in The Atlantic, Smids stated, “Until I began noticing the developments in other EU countries and started reading the scientific literature myself, I too thought that the Dutch gender care was very careful and evidence-based,” Jilles Smids, a postdoctoral researcher in medical ethics at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, told me via email. “But now I don’t think that any more.”

Anti-trans think tank Manhattan Institute summarized Smids’ efforts to ban gender-affirming care for minors:

The first trigger-point in the Netherlands’s trans discourse was a medical paper by researchers Jilles Smids and Patrik Vankrunkelsven. Smids and Vankrunkelsven penned the paper in response to a clinical lesson.

Smids and Vankrunkelsven seem perplexed that the clinical lesson’s authors would endorse puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as the default treatment approach for youth when systematic reviews, including England’s NICE review, have concluded that the evidence for these interventions’ safety and effectiveness is weak. Smids and Vankrunkelsven added that if the authors used the same GRADE system used in many evidence reviews to arrive at treatment recommendations.

Smids and Vankrunkelsven also criticized the clinical lesson for failing to distinguish between clinical presentations with adolescent-onset and childhood-onset dysphoria.

Smids and Vankrunkelsven also noted that the true regret rate in the emergent cohort of adolescent-onset-dysphoria sufferers is unknown because some research suggests that regret can take up to eight to ten years to manifest.

The second catalyst for the Netherlands’s recent reconsideration came from a Dutch legal journal, Nederlands Juristenblad, which published an article by Lodewijk Smeehuijzen, Jilles Smids, and Coen Hoekstra arguing that the country’s current national guidelines for treating gender-distressed youth—again, the 2018 Dutch protocol—fail to meet the legal definition of a standard of care. 

References

Figliolia, Joseph (December 1, 2023). A Raging Transgender Debate in the Netherlands. City Journal https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-raging-transgender-debate-in-the-netherlands

Klotz, Frieda (April 28, 2023). A Teen Gender-Care Debate Is Spreading Across Europe. The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/04/gender-affirming-care-debate-europe-dutch-protocol/673890/

Selected publications by Smids

Gorin M, Smids J, Lantos J (2025). Toward Evidence-Based and Ethical Pediatric Gender Medicine. JAMA 2025 Mar 11;333(10):841-842. doi: https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2024.28203

Smids J (2025). [International criticism of the Dutch Protocol; time to change Dutch pediatric gender care and its guideline]. Ned Tijdschr Geneeskd. 2025 May 29;169:D8471.PMID: 40433715 

Gorin M,, Smids J, Lantos J (2025). Pediatric Gender Medicine-Reply. JAMA. 2025 May 21. doi: 10.1001/jama.2025.3404. Online ahead of print.PMID: 40397440 

Clayton A, Smids J, McDeavitt K (2025). Letter to the Editor on “Timing of puberty suppression in transgender adolescents and sexual functioning after vaginoplasty (Van der Meulen et al., 2024)”. J Sex Med. 2025 May 10;22(5):982-983. doi: 10.1093/jsxmed/qdaf030.PMID: 40042598 

Gorin M,, Smids J, Lantos J (2025). Toward Evidence-Based and Ethical Pediatric Gender Medicine.JAMA. 2025 Mar 11;333(10):841-842. doi: 10.1001/jama.2024.28203.PMID: 398047415

Gorin M,, Smids J (2025). Errors, Omissions, and Pediatric Gender Medicine. Am J Bioeth. 2024 Dec;24(12):W6-W8. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2024.2416143. Epub 2024 Oct 22.PMID: 39436785 

Smids J, Vankrunkelsven P (2023). [Uncertainties around the current gender care: five problems with the clinical lesson ‘Youth with gender incongruence’]. Ned Tijdschr Geneeskd. 2023 Nov 1;167:D7941.

Resources

Erasmus MC (erasmusmc.nl)

Google Scholar (scholar.google.nl)

  • Jilles Smids
  • scholar.google.nl/citations?user=Q40uKdgAAAAJ&hl=nl

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