The Netherlands Minister of Education, Culture and Science, Ingrid van Engelshoven, has notified the country's parliament that the government is planning to remove the 'gender' field from all forms of IDs beginning 2024 or 2025. The change will affect all newly issued IDs.
In her words, the measure, the implementation of which is rooted in an agreement of a government coalition, is needed to remove unnecessary gender registrations. The minister argued that the removal of gender will have little impact on authorities' daily operations, but is important for non-binary people.
The latter, according to van Engelshoven, currently can pick a third option, to a gender registered as "not defined", but must file an appeal in court to do so. At the same time, these people still have the 'gender' graph in passports, per EU regulation requirements.
The Netherlands is not the only European country to undertake gender-related changes to its documents. France has replaced the fields 'mother' and 'father' in documents with 'parent' 1 and 2, while Germany has introduced a third gender option for those born with both genders' phenotypes.
