The Netherlands Invented Gay Marriage. Its Acceptance Numbers Are Now Going Backwards

On April 1, 2001, just after midnight, Amsterdam's then-mayor Job Cohen married four couples and the Netherlands became the first country in the world to open marriage to same-sex partners. Twenty-five years later, the country that exported that idea is reporting the opposite trend: acceptance is slipping, and it is slipping fastest among the people who were supposed to inherit it.

The evidence is no longer anecdotal. It comes from a national health monitor, from sports research and from the organisations that log every report of discrimination — and the numbers all point the same way.

On the sports field, the locker room got colder

Research by the Mulier Institute found that the share of sports participants who said they had no problem with a gay clubmate fell from 85% in 2008 to 66% in 2026. Comfort with showering alongside a gay athlete of the same sex dropped from 73% to 55%. Meanwhile, the share of members who said their club actively addressed gay acceptance rose from 12% in 2017 to 28% — more conversation, less comfort.

Karin Blankenstein of the John Blankenstein Foundation, which runs inclusion workshops in Dutch sport, told NOS that interest in those sessions is falling. Clubs still want them, she said; parents often object.

Schools: the sharpest drop of all

The Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study by Utrecht University and the Trimbos Institute found that the share of boys in secondary school with a positive attitude towards homosexuality fell from 40% in 2021 to 22% in 2025. Among girls it dropped from 78% to 51%. In 2021, 60% of pupils thought a gay or lesbian classmate could be open at school; by 2025 that had fallen to 45%.

The national LGBTQIA+ monitor, run by Movisie with Ipsos I&O and Panteia across some 3,000 respondents, adds the wider picture. More than 80% of Dutch people say they accept gay and lesbian people, but the share who are uncomfortable with two men kissing in public rose from about a fifth in 2024 to roughly a quarter. Acceptance of transgender people fell by three percentage points, and more than a third of respondents do not see trans women as "real women". Acceptance of non-binary people slipped from 54% to 52%, and of intersex people from 68% to 66%.

"Attitudes toward homosexuality became increasingly positive for a long time. Although a large majority of people still accept homosexuality, we are now seeing for the first time that this upward trend is no longer continuing." — Karijn van den Berg, senior researcher at Movisie

The reports are climbing too

COC Netherlands, citing police and anti-discrimination services, counted 2,654 reports of discrimination and violence against LGBTQIA+ people in 2022, 3,257 in 2023, 4,467 in 2024 and roughly 4,800 in 2025. Transgender Netwerk recorded 399 unique reports in 2025 against 264 in 2024 — a rise of 51%.

Those figures count reports, not convictions, and researchers caution that rising numbers can reflect better reporting as much as more incidents. Police note that most discrimination is never reported at all. COC director Marie Ricardo and Transgender Network chair Remke Verdegem responded jointly, calling the stagnation "a worrying development, especially when combined with declining acceptance among young people".

Marriage equality took decades of campaigning to win. Holding onto the society that made it normal is proving to be a different, and slower, fight.

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Sources: IamExpat, "LGBTQIA+ acceptance in the Netherlands is dropping" (27 October 2026), citing NOS, the Mulier Institute, Utrecht University and the Trimbos Institute; NL Times, "Acceptance of LGBTQIA+ people stalls or declines in the Netherlands, monitor finds" (6 October 2026), citing the Movisie monitor with Ipsos I&O and Panteia.