Writer, artist and trans woman

Dirkje Kuik is not only one of Utrecht's most important artists of the 20th century, but also its most famous trans woman. "I never decided to become a woman. I should have been from the start," was one of her signature statements.

Dirkje, born in 1929 as William Diederich Kuik, had an unusual childhood.

I walked around the house in nightgown, satin shoes, and luxurious wigs. No one ever said: that's not allowed, that's not right,

she said in a 1978 interview with Bibeb. The Kuik family wasn't well-off, but there was an open, almost bohemian atmosphere. Kuik's father was a woodworker and ornament maker, and in the mid-1930s he and his wife and child settled at Oude Kamp 1 in Utrecht. Decades later, the modest house would become Dirkje's personal home and studio.

At primary school, William was confronted with a very different mentality than the one he had at home. His classmates reacted with mockery, name-calling, and fighting towards the boy, who preferred to wear girls' clothes, and so they were soon swapped for boys'.

Artist and writer

Kuik studied fine arts at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam, worked as an art critic for newspaper Het Parool, and illustrated for the weekly magazine Vrij Nederland. Together with Joop Moesman and Henc van Maarseveen, she founded the graphic design company De Luis (The Louse). From 1958 to 1972, with a few years' interruption, she was a member of the Utrecht society Kunstliefde (Love of Art).

Dirkje was fascinated by the past and by urban decay. Various Italian cities, as well as Utrecht, inspired her to create drawings and etchings in which buildings already reveal the ruins hidden within. This applied not only to the centuries-old Utrecht Domtoren (Cathedral tower) but also to the apartment buildings in the neighbourhood Kanaleneiland, which she captured shortly after their completion in 1964.

Her first book, Utrechtse Notities (Utrecht Notes), was published in 1968, followed by some twenty other titles. Her oeuvre comprises a unique blend of poems, autobiographical sketches, stories, essays, and drawings. Her illustrations depict real and imaginary animals and human figures, often wearing hats from the Italian Renaissance or Napoleonic France. Her work has received numerous awards.

Gender diaspora

Dirkje, then still William, married Marieke van Vuren in 1958, who gave her the freedom to wear women's clothing at home. In the mid-1960s, Dirkje and Marieke separated. From 1977 onward, Dirkje wore only women's clothing and went by her new name. This was the situation she described to Bibeb a year later:

As I am now, I can handle it just fine. I'm not one of those people who will be destroyed by it, but I'm still a dressed-up guy, and that bothers me. I can't just go out in my denim skirt to sweep the sidewalk for a bit. It's getting better, mind you, but that's up to me. You have to put up with it all yourself.

By the time Dirkje Kuik was interviewed by Bibeb, she had already decided she no longer wanted to be a "dressed-up guy" and had already started hormone therapy. In a previously filmed interview, she said:

From the moment I started taking those hormones, I improved, physically as well. I looked beautiful, or at least quite decent, and things started to get better; I was growing. It was like a second puberty, but a good one.

In 1979, Dirkje Kuik decided to undergo gender-affirming surgery. Due to the long waiting lists in the Netherlands, she went to London. She wrote an extensive article about that surgery and how her life as a woman continued in the newspaper NRC Handelsblad (1980) and in her book Huishoudboekje met rozijnen (Housekeeping booklet with Raisins) (1984). In it, she describes how a doctor gave her a "neovagina" made from "penile remains." Dirkje preferred not to call herself transsexual (the common term at the time), but rather a "gender diaspora patient."

A new life

After her transition, she felt reborn. She lost friends who didn't accept her transition, but she also made new ones, such as the bricklayer Jo Nijenhuis, with whom she had a happy relationship for fifteen years until his death in 2001. She was unfazed by the fact that some art lovers returned her work to the gallery where they had purchased it. Like other transgender people, Kuik was only able to change her gender on her birth certificate and other official documents after a lengthy legal battle. It was partly thanks to her activism that a law finally passed in 1985 allowing for official gender reassignment.

Dirkje was considered "a woman with instructions": headstrong, sharp-tongued, someone with whom you easily got into arguments. For the last thirty years of her life, she returned to her childhood home at Oude Kamp 1. Illness led her to retreat more and more until Jos te Water Mulder took her under his wing, organized an exhibition, and inspired her to create new work. After her death, he established the Dirkje Kuik Foundation and opened her house as a museum. It had to close in 2012 due to lack of funding. Only a poem and a drawing on the facade across the street remain as reminders of the building's remarkable occupant.

Source of inspiration

Dirkje Kuik and her work continue to inspire. A few recent examples: in 2020, the Centraal Museum hosted the exhibition Andere Geschiedenis volgens Dirkje Kuik en Philipp Gufler (Another History According to Dirkje Kuik and Philipp Gufler). Commissioned by the museum, artist Philipp Gufler (Augsburg, 1989) created a quilt—a screen-printed canvas—about Kuik's life. This is part of a series in which Gufler depicts queer artists, writers, the German magazine Die Freundin, and vanished meeting places.

In December 2024, the literary Salon Saffier, in collaboration with Galerie Waterbolk and the Municipality of Utrecht, organized a multi-day program with lectures, an exhibition, and the unveiling of a "attention tile" with a QR code at her former home. And since 2023, the Utrecht Queer Culture Festival has organized the annual Dirkje Kuik lecture. The first was delivered by children's book author Pim Lammers, followed by Member of Parliament Ines Kostić (2024) and journalist, DJ, and model Valentijn de Hingh (2025).

Simone Versteeg

Maurice van Lieshout