About Mandy
Falling through the transgender cracks in the Netherlands
I wrote the following around the Day of Transgender Remembrance. Lo and behold, I didn’t know what to do with it. I want to give Mandy (the subject of the article) good exposure, but I never found the right place. Hopefully, that is here. Now that we are on the Day of Transgender Visibility, which is supposed to be the less sombre of the dyad of transgender days, I think it is the right time, as there is not a lot to celebrate these days, but there is a lot that is worth making visible.
About a girl: I remember the first time I met Mandy Blåhaj (pseudonym) in 2017. I had just arrived in Holland, and I wanted to make trans friends. I had been camping out in east Asia for some time and the queer scene, especially the trans one, was very underground there — Seoul’s queer cultural festival (pride) was attracting more protestors than attendees (when it was allowed to organize at all). I was certain that moving to Europe would entail legions of transfeminine friends. But when I arrived in Utrecht, there was a paucity of potential acquaintances — at least of the trans femme feather. I tried to go to a meet-up hosted by the COC or some other LGBTI+ NGO, but it was not a very social event. The denizens at the meet were akin to awkward Grade 8 students at their first co-ed dance. People shuffled about looking at their feet and mostly talked about surgeries they wanted. But I wanted a “trans revolution” and to subvert such pedestrian cisnormativity concerns. I was just as naïve and seemingly lost, but I knew I had not found companionship.
My second attempt at mediated socialisation was at a meet-up for queer/trans/nonbinary folks — the aesthetic of the advertisement for the support group included a unicorn puking a rainbow — neoclubkid-kitch. The group was hosted in a local bookshop after 19:00 midweek. Having been in the Netherlands for little more than two months, as a freshly out trans, I was terrified. The support group meet-up was full of nonbinary zoomers and young millennials, but no one looked like me. I — a xenial — cut my teeth on grunge and could remember the aftermath of the AIDS crisis; I didn’t seem to fit here either. More than age, culture, and demographics, there were no trans women at the meeting — other than the host (who still was not fully out). I remembered the Toronto gay scene of the 00s when I came of age. I had come out in the anxious post-millennial climate of the financial collapse. I had then ditched the scene and moved east to engage in nearly a decade of orientalism and hedonic beach combing. I was only peripherally aware of what nonbinary was. I felt out of place, in this group of nonbinary trans mascs. But everyone was welcoming, and I came back for the second round of panopticonic group therapy.
Mandy was at one of these early meetings. She was young, vibrant, earnest, and welcoming. We became friends quickly. While I was not interested in making physical friendships, I was drawn to her physicality and youth. I was a haggard 32 at the time, having medically transitioned around 30. She was 23, or something, and this seemed inconceivable to me. I remember floating through our initial conversations together intoxicated by the heady possibilities that she represented. I am not, like so many trans women are, obsessed with having wasted my youth by transitioning outside my 20s. I came out early to myself and a few others around 2000, but I had not yet heard the word “transgender.” I was still too affected by Buffalo Bill’s cathode-ray presence in my parent’s living room. But I was initially captivated by the possibility of this counterfactual reality Mandy represented.
Mandy and I have been friends these past six years or so — with lapsed moments. Sometimes, trans femmes can demand a lot because of the world, and I am not always able to give. As I got to know her better, I learned about her life and situation. First at an art deco bar drowning in dark wood that first October. There she let her life spill effortlessly from her mouth. I didn’t know at the time, but this was in part an aspect of her autism. A characteristic she speaks about openly. I first noticed the way she easily interacted with everyone with a sense of laudable abandon at a queer party in Rotterdam where she changed naked amongst a throng of onlookers, tucking expertly, as if she was in her own WC taking her time at home. I bring up this diagnosis because it is important to the narrative I am relating here. In many ways, Mandy Blåhaj’s life should have been a good one. She is young, Dutch, white, and the child of middle-class Dutch parents; she grew up in Holland, Germany, and Norway. But her autism was ignored throughout her childhood — which is not uncommon in the Netherlands — and she was unsupported by her parents — at least not emotionally. Left to fend for her social development, she found university and living away from home hard. When she transitioned, her relationship with her parents was not improved. And she was forced to plod along through the Dutch healthcare system on her own without much support.
While this is hardly the most harrowing trans story I have encountered, the implications of it are not to be underestimated. Autistic, and indeed, recently diagnoses with fibromyalgia, which leaves the body feeling exhausted and in pain, she was on her own. The VuMC’s Kennis en zorgcentrum genderdysforie, Dutch for centre for gender dysphoria, is infamous for its conservative and highly gender normative care (this is a feeling that stems from first-hand experience and the community more broadly). Mandy, a nonbinary trans femme, felt out of place and had to suffer through years of conservative hormone therapy which limited her oestrogen levels to a minimum. She also felt deeply out of place in an environment she felts was trying to railroad her into a specific form of transgender.
Mandy quickly began to struggle more and more, slipping into a spiralling state of despondency, driven by mental health crises, a transphobic society, inadequate healthcare, and marginalisation as a neurodivergent person. Because of these intersecting issues, Mandy has a hard time working, finishing school, or maintaining satisfying social relationships. But over the last few years, she has found housing and some assistance once leaving her parents. Thankfully, in the Netherlands, access to social housing is more accessible than in other places.
Again, not so bad — as far as trans stories go — and I wish it ended here. However, despite the Netherlands’ gleaming reputation as a liberal state par excellence, it is unfortunately a neoliberal paradise. The welfare system was long ago executed by the long-incumbent centre-right conservative party under Mark Rutte. Free-market privatization and pro-business ethos have gutted many of the country’s social benefits: leaving it less than welcoming to those who are different or struggling financially. Nevertheless, this is not the dominant perspective of the Netherlands, both from within and without. In the village where I live(d), there is a statue of the concept of tolerance — tolerantie in Dutch. However, in my experience, the evidence for tolerance is thin in the Netherlands, at least in the ways where tolerance stops being performative or superficial and transforms into acceptance. Like many Western countries, there is increasing mistrust of foreigners, most alarmingly, brown Muslim ones. With regard to gender politics, the UN has cited the Dutch policy of gender neutrality as a problem, because it ignores how the majority of gender-based violence targets women and girls (UN CEDAW and Althoff et al. 2019).
The main evidence for the myth of tolerance seems to be found in their early — not insignificant — adoption of gay marriage. But Dutch people, when polled, are not particularly accepting of LGBTQ+ people, they just don’t care if they exist, so long as they steer clear and behave like everyone else. This last sentiment is captured by professor Dr John de Wit in an article about pride published by Utrecht University in 2018. Despite some human rights organisations, like the UCLA William’s Institute in the States ranking the Netherlands high on their list of acceptance for LGBTI groups, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2019 survey data — titled “EU LGBTI survey II” — paints a more muddled picture. In line with this, I know queer couples, who are largely normatively codded, save for same-sex attraction, who have been heckled on the street. Again, not so bad, as far as these things go, but hardly tolerant in a meaningful way.
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Furthermore, the Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (SCP) just released data suggesting that trans acceptance lags behind general gay and bi acceptance substantially (I read an English summary, take that as a caveat). As such, the prospects for a trans feminine person, who is neurodivergent and crippled, are slim. To be fair, this is not a uniquely Dutch problem. There are not many better options out there — but I am only trying to be fair, and not complacent with mediocrity. I find sometimes we like to avoid criticising the best or worst option because the alternative is far worse.
The reason why I am profiling Mandy is her experience with the life options she is left with. Dutch society thinks that disability is nonsense and that she should work. This is a common neoliberal attitude, rugged individualism. However, Mandy is prepared to work at the only job left open to her, sex work. Sex work, or a pistol to the head (or equivalent), are often the only options for trans femmes — the chances of this increase with the more ways she is marginalized. Mandy stacks at least three axes of marginalization — trans femme/nonbinary, crippled, and neurodivergent. As an outside observer of Dutch society — and as a Canadian — I am supposedly witnessing some of the best environments to be trans and a sex worker in. Canada and the Netherlands have reputations as international bastions of human rights. While both Canada and the Netherlands have legal mechanisms for transgender individuals to access trans healthcare and legal technologies to change their registered/assigned sex/gender, they only promote trans people who otherwise can stand on their own two feet, as it were. Other bodies, the ones who cannot pass or work, are left to languish and perish. Nowhere is this perhaps more explicit in how Mandy is foiled from doing sex work.
Mandy receives a paltry welfare payment each month. As in other Western countries, there is a strong, Reaganesque, aversion to the welfare queen in the Netherlands. I remember a few years ago there was a national scandal because a disabled woman was forced to pay her disability allotment back because her mother was helping her with her groceries. This is a country with a royal family that receives millions of euros a year in stipends from the taxpayer. Mandy’s 1000 euros a month income is subjected to regular income reporting by the government to ensure she has no other income. She is also limited to 28 days each year when she is allowed to leave the country — which is counter to the ethos of the EU and Schengen Zone. The only reasons for these draconian surveillance measures are punitive. Regardless of FOSTA-SESTA decimation of electronic platforms to autonomously host sex work, Mandy would be unable to access the few remaining platforms. She cannot use Onlyfans because any income would be checked.
While the Netherlands has a reputation for its progressive attitude toward sex workers, this is also false — or again, excelling as the best worst option. In the last decade, sex workers have been kicked out of safer facilities and onto the street on trumped-up trafficking laws. As a result of this assault on sex work and redlight districts, sex workers are terrified of reporting the rampant abuse that happens inside legal brothels, because they will be shut down. The workers who remain legitimate are forced to create their own companies and hire accounting services to pay their taxes — which Mandy cannot do as a disabled person receiving welfare.
In Mandy’s city, which is one of the more progressive in the country (not Amsterdam), there is a monitored sex workspace, where workers can access security even when working without the above-mentioned business apparatus. However, Mandy was denied working here — which still requires a permit — because she did not have a record of working illegally on the street or being assaulted/raped. Because of this, she has had to pursue sex work, when she has the energy, in neighbouring Belgium, where she has made contacts and has a community. However, working over the border, and getting paid in cash, is problematic, because if she is found out, she will lose her state welfare payment and could incur hefty fines.
With increasing inflation and the general climate around trans people, plus this level of precarity, what chance is there for Mandy to not be heavily stressed and burnt out? A high allostatic load is all but a given which intern contributes to more degradation and hardship via chronic illness and marginalization.
Recently, Mandy attended a meeting to be designated by the state as “fully disabled.” This would mean a little more income as well as some relaxation of travel and income caps. However, she was denied, as she reports the intake assessment determined she could work for up to an hour a day — based on her attending the mandatory meeting. More shockingly, she was told by the occupational therapist they suspected that being trans was causing her too much stress and that she should detransition! When I responded to this remark suggesting that she should take action against this clear transphobia, Mandy admitted that it was a common attitude she found in state care and psychiatric services — “besides” she said, “with what energy?” Fair enough, advocating for oneself as a trans person is itself a full-time job, but this statement, coming causally from a healthcare provider, is shocking. I think if you polled most trans people, detrasitioning — despite what TERFs might say — would be a death sentence.
Recounting this story brings me back to the youthful face I met over half a decade ago. I have not seen Mandy’s face in person since before the pandemic, but I assume that some of that exuberance have been rubbed out. I certainly hear this in her voice. The bubbles have flattened. How is this nominally privileged — white, Dutch, middle-class origin story — girl supposed to survive? I recently responded to an Instagram repost of Transgender Europe’s (TGEU) comment on trans violence for the Day of Transgender Remembrance. The NGO posted the grim statistics for this year’s abysmal trans murder rates. I noted that this type of framing perpetuates the narrative that trans violence only happens between individual actors and erases its systemic nature — tragic as murder rates are. I believe I asked, “when was the last time you heard of tranny dying of old age?” I rankled TGEU into responding. Their response — which is truthful — is that those statistics would be too hard to get: death by systemic oppression across European states. Nevertheless, NGOs like this are invested in reproducing the aesthetic of combating oppression. If the narrative is cast as “some bad actors,” true bigots, then the hate crime laws they advocate for can ameliorate the issue — punishing the bad outliers in a society otherwise full of diversity and justice. But what good is that for Mandy?
I’m interested in who is omitted by this ritual, the Day of Transgender Remembrance, when it is framed this way. Who doesn’t get their soul exercised by the séance? The transfeminine, transmasculine, and genderqueer folks who die through attrition or by their own hands (as proxies for state murder). This mass of uncounted numbers is crushed under the constant torrent of media criticism, social ostracism, and gatekeeping via public policy amendments that we experience to our detriment every day. I can imagine a woman like Mandy, a spectre omitted from this type of framing when her likely limited life span comes to the end of its coil — forgotten. Leaving aside the maelstrom of transphobia, specifically transmisogyny, which trans people find themselves the hypervisible focal point of, the experiences of Mandy Blåhaj, which are by no means unique, represent a form of the banality of evil — death by Kafkaesque bureaucracy and gatekeeping.
This potential for state-caused murder is what I always find absent from the numbers posted each year on the Day of Transgender Remembrance. I don’t know how to resolve this grim paradigm when a state service provider can so causally, and seemingly inconsequentially say, “maybe you should detransition,” as if that wasn’t anything but a death sentence. It might not be rape and murder on the street, but the alienation and damage of this type of ubiquitous attitude accumulate over a (shorter)lifetime, and is often, just as deadly — if not a little bit slow.
*The above has been approved for publication by Mandy. She gave a detailed overview of her experiences during several phone calls during October and November 2022.
