Belgium’s transgender deputy prime minister on why it’s not her ‘job’ to be a trans spokesperson

Belgium’s new deputy prime minister speaks to Leo Cendrowicz in Brussels about her life, her career and why she doesn’t want to talk about JK Rowling

Petra De Sutter (Jesse De Meulenaere) (Jesse De Meulenaere)

Belgium’s new deputy prime minister, Petra De Sutter, knows why she is being interviewed. “If I were not a transgender woman, you would not be sitting here, right?” she says, smiling. “But ideally, this should not be an issue at all.”

She has a point. As Europe’s first openly transgender minister, Ms De Sutter, 57, has made history. Although she could have made headlines as Belgium’s first green government minister since 2003, or for her pioneering work on reproductive rights, it is her transgender identity that has made her appointment such a milestone.

But while Ms De Sutter says she’d like people to focus more on her scientific research or her ministerial portfolio, she accepts her position as a rare trans person in politics. “I have mixed feelings, as I don't want to be portrayed as only this, which is really reductionist,” she tells The Independent. “But I understand how important it is to be a role model. And to maybe make those that do not understand change their minds. No, I'm not going to travel around the world as the transgender minister. But if it can give hope to people or inspire people, I'm willing to take that role.”

Ms De Sutter is speaking from her office in central Brussels, where five different ministries are based. She was tapped earlier this month to become one of the country’s seven deputy prime ministers in the seven-party government coalition that just took office. She was handed responsibility for overseeing Belgium's public administration and public enterprises.  

Yet her transgender identity barely made any waves in Belgium. “I am proud that in Belgium and in most of Europe your gender identity does not define you as a person and is a non-issue,” Ms De Sutter tweeted when she took office.  

This was partly because she was already well-known to the Belgian public. She had built a reputation as a gynaecologist and fertility expert as the head of Ghent University Hospital’s reproductive medicine department.

Ms De Sutter only entered politics in 2014, running for election to the European Parliament with Groen, a Belgian green party. While she failed to be elected then, she became a Belgian senator that year. When she made it as an MEP in 2019, she was swiftly given one of the assembly’s most powerful jobs, as chair of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection.  

But she is keen to show that her political rise is based on merit. “Going through this sort of transition is not a classic political career path. No one would plan it that way,” she says, wryly. “I don’t think you get to be deputy prime minister because of your gender identity, or sexual orientation. You know, Obama was much more than a black man when he became the US president. Elio Di Rupo, who became prime minister of Belgium ten years ago, was much more than a gay politician.”

Belgium has a relatively progressive record on gender issues. In 2003, it was the second country in the world – after the Netherlands – to allow same-sex marriage. One of the most celebrated Belgian films of recent years is the Cannes Caméra d'Or-winning 2018 movie Girl, about a trans girl training to become a ballerina while preparing for her sex reassignment surgery. And last week, during a meet-the-voter TV event, a Flemish woman asked US presidential hopeful Joe Biden if he was prepared to repeal the discriminatory measures against transgender people like her daughter (Mr Biden said: “I will flat out just change the law, eliminate those executive orders, number one.”)  

However, she does not see herself as the go-to person for commentary on trans issues. For example, she does not want to be drawn into the heated debate about Harry Potter author JK Rowling’s comments on trans rights. “I don't have to give my opinion on everything that happens in that field,” she says. “That's not my job.”

And as sporting authorities wrangle about whether to allow transgender women to compete (the International Olympic Committee allows this, but World Rugby said on 9 October they would be barred from the international game), she deflects the question. “When people ask, I tell them to talk to academics working on these issues. I'm not a specialist, I'm just one individual, with a very personal experience, which is probably very different,” she says.

Ms De Sutter has always been open about her trans identity. Born as Peter De Sutter in Oudenarde, a small town in East Flanders, she had a tough childhood, bullied cruelly for her sensitivity. She recalls one moment her head being pushed into the ground and forced to eat grass. “I was just a child, feeling different from the others and not understanding at all what was happening to me. I felt bad. I felt sinful,” she says.

Raised as a Catholic, she realized she was the very person that preachers would warn about. “I become the outcast, the marginalised, the freak, the different one, the dangerous one,” she says. “But that has given me a lot of tolerance for people who are different. It fundamentally changed me. And that has made me a much better doctor. Because suddenly I was the patient."

Ms De Sutter became a doctor in 1987, eventually joining the Belgian Superior High Health Council and the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine – and along the way writing three books and publishing more than 550 peer-reviewed articles. But it was only when she was 40, after fighting depression and suicide, she decided “to fully become the woman that I always was”. She chose the name Petra because it means rock in Greek.

I become the outcast, the marginalised, the freak, the different one, the dangerous one. But that has given me a lot of tolerance for people who are different. It fundamentally changed me

Petra De Sutter

She says gender non-conforming is not a disease or a sin, but rather a variation on the gender continuum. “You don't change your sex. You adapt your body to the gender that you have. I never felt male. I just had a body that didn't fit,” she says. “Of course, gender is not the same thing as biological sex. And a lot of people do not agree with that: they say gender does not exist and there is only biological sex, I can tell you from personal experience, this is wrong.”

She is now married and has a son. But she is still cautious telling her story, saying she was “very privileged because so many people that lived through what I lived do not survive”. The life expectancy of transgender people in Brazil is 35 years – and most of them are in our very marginalised, are in prostitution. “They do it because they need to pay their treatments and their medication and so on. The suicide rates are also extremely high,” she says.  

It is not much better in richer countries: in the US, at least 31 transgender or gender non-conforming people have been fatally shot or killed by other violent means – although the true number may be higher as many deaths go unreported or misreported. In Europe, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and Hungary have introduced legislation to ban discussions of gender identity at school.

Ms De Sutter, who has a passion for sci-fi, cites the 1999 movie The Matrix, which co-director Lilly Wachowski says is a metaphor for her own journey towards a transgender identity. In the film, the main character, played by Keanu Reeves, takes a red pill that allows him to see reality for what it truly is. Ms De Sutter takes the pill allegory further. “Say that you put a blue pill here told me that if I took it, I could be born a girl. Would I take it?” she asks. “Would I say, ‘my life sucks’ and rewind and start all over again? Of course, if I was 12 years old, I would have taken it. But at this point in life, I'm not sure. It made me who I am. And I'm quite happy with where I am now.”

Thanks to gene manipulations, these operations are no longer fanciful. “Can you manipulate the human genome to make taller, stronger, with blue eyes?” Ms De Sutter asks. “Can we make them more intelligent, give them a stronger immune system? Stopping a handicapped child being born is probably a good thing. But using that technology to make bigger and stronger and more beautiful babies: no.”  

Still, she hesitates to say where the line is. And she is honest and open enough to express doubts – a quality that she attributes to her own experience. “I don't have answers to all the questions. But I don't feel that I still have to prove anything. I've lived with secrets for 40 years, and it was a prison. I feel free now, and every day is a gift. And that gives me an energy and a moral duty to be part of the solution.”