Arjen Lubach wants the gender identity to be removed from the Dutch passport. The influential NPO star finds it irrelevant to mention whether someone is male or female.
A new transgender law is being worked on that will make it easier to change your gender in your passport. “The new law is certainly better than it is now, but the stupid thing is that the terms gender and gender are still being used interchangeably, because look: what is in your passport is your gender,” says NPO star Arjen Lubach. .
‘It is not right!’
Gender is about how you feel – male, female, both or neither – and gender, as it is written in the passport, is about the physical characteristics with which someone is born. “You can easily change that letter later, but your gender and your gender are different things.”
Arjen critically: “Not everyone who wants to change their passport undergoes an operation first. You change those letters to match your gender, but what you can change in your passport is there as your gender. So it would make more sense to replace the word ‘gender’ in all passports with the word ‘gender’, because then it would be correct.”
“Take out gender!”
In 2022 it is better to simply remove the entire ‘gender’ section from your passport, Arjen believes. “The most logical thing would be to just remove the entire gender category, just nothing, because why should gender or gender be in the passport at all? It used to include your hair color and even the shape of your face.”
According to Arjen, the reason that gender is in the passport has to do with international regulations. The costs at border authorities and airlines to change that would be ‘significant’. “Let’s all start saving for new computers to remove gender from passports altogether.”
Fragment
The fragment from the show by Arjen Lubach:
