Gay Acceptance Is Falling Among Dutch Teenagers. What the New Data Shows

The Netherlands has long carried an international reputation for LGBTQ+ tolerance. New research involving thousands of Dutch schoolchildren, however, suggests something significant is shifting among younger teenagers, and the direction is not encouraging.

The latest Dutch Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study found a sharp decline in positive attitudes towards homosexuality between 2021 and 2025. Among boys in secondary education, the proportion expressing a positive attitude fell from 40% to 22%. Among secondary-school girls, it dropped from 78% to 51%.

That does not mean Dutch teenagers have suddenly become uniformly hostile towards LGBTQ+ people. But the scale and speed of the change are difficult to ignore.

Gay acceptance in the Netherlands has fallen sharply

The 2025 Dutch HBSC survey included 1,510 pupils in the final year of primary education and 5,541 secondary-school students. Researchers at Utrecht University and the Trimbos Institute conducted the study, which was funded by the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport.

The change is particularly striking because it breaks with the previous pattern. HBSC has asked comparable questions since 2009. Until 2021, attitudes among boys had remained relatively stable while positive attitudes among girls had generally increased.

Then the direction changed.

Researchers also asked whether gay and lesbian students could be open about their sexual orientation at school. In 2021, 60% of secondary-school pupils thought they could. By 2025, that figure had fallen to 45%.

Another Dutch dataset points to a similar concern among younger teenage boys. Rutgers revisited its Sex Under 25 research and found that among boys aged 13 to 16, the proportion who disapproved of two boys kissing in public rose from 32% in 2017 to 40% in 2023. Disapproval of two girls kissing rose from 14% to 24% over the same period. Among girls, however, the longer-term trend towards greater acceptance continued, creating an increasingly pronounced gender gap.

Why are attitudes changing?

That is the big question — and one researchers cannot yet answer definitively.

It would be tempting to point immediately at TikTok, the manosphere, anti-LGBTQ+ influencers or increasingly polarised online culture. Those factors deserve investigation, particularly when young people now encounter political and social messages through algorithms as much as through families, schools or traditional media.

But the HBSC study does not establish a causal link between social media and declining acceptance of homosexuality. Presenting one as proven would go beyond the evidence currently available.

Researchers have also looked at whether demographic changes could explain the results. HBSC notes that the proportion of students with a migration background was similar in the 2021 and 2025 samples, while the decline in positive attitudes appeared among students both with and without a migration background. The researchers also found that teenagers had not become similarly more negative about physical intimacy overall: the change was specifically visible in attitudes towards same-sex intimacy.

That makes the trend harder to dismiss as a statistical quirk.

The gender divide may be one of the biggest clues

One feature appears repeatedly across the research: boys are considerably less accepting than girls, and in some datasets that divide is widening.

That deserves attention beyond the Netherlands. Across Europe and elsewhere, researchers, educators and campaigners have increasingly examined how young men encounter ideas about masculinity, gender and sexuality online. But identifying a pattern is not the same as proving what causes it.

The next step has to be understanding what young people themselves are hearing, watching and discussing — and which messages are actually shaping their attitudes.

HBSC is also cautious about international comparisons. Data collection for the current international survey cycle is still continuing in other countries, meaning researchers cannot yet say whether the Dutch decline is part of a broader European trend or something particularly pronounced in the Netherlands.

A tolerant reputation cannot be taken for granted

The Netherlands became the first country in the world to open civil marriage to same-sex couples in 2001, helping cement its reputation as one of the countries at the forefront of LGBTQ+ equality.

But legal progress and social acceptance are not the same thing.

Rights can change what people are permitted to do. They cannot guarantee what the next generation will think.

That is why these new figures matter. They do not prove that the Netherlands has suddenly become an anti-LGBTQ+ country, nor that every Dutch teenager is moving in the same direction. What they do show is that an assumption many people have made for years — that each generation will automatically become more accepting than the one before it — may be considerably less secure than we thought.

Progress, apparently, does not come with an auto-renew button.