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Lodewijk Smeehuijzen vs. transgender people

Lodewijk Smeehuijzen is a Dutch legal scholar and anti-transgender activist.

Background

According to a university profile:

Lodewijk Smeehuijzen holds a master in law from the University of Amsterdam (1996). He practiced law for five years at De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek and Houthoff Buruma (1996 – 2001), concentrating on litigation and commercial contracts. In 2008 he defended his Ph.D. thesis (cum laude) on limitation of actions. He currently is professor of private law at the VU law faculty and honorary judge in the Court of Appeal Arnhem-Leeuwarden. In 2016 he received the Frank van der Duijn Schouten award for best senior teacher of the VU-University.

Anti-trans activism

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

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. The authors note that case-law precedent has established that a standard of care must be evidence-based, follow a reproducible and properly designed methodology, and have a limited “ethical dimension.” By limited “ethical dimension,” the authors mean that a standard of care’s credibility comes from its medical expertise. If guidelines are primarily mediating questions of ethics that stand outside the bounds of their medical expertise, they are less credible.

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

Resources

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (research.vu.nl)