Betty Paërl (1935–2022) was a Dutch mathematician, writer, professional dominatrix, and transgender rights activist who treated kink, sex work, and gender as political questions, not private vices. Amsterdam readers met her first as a University of Amsterdam lecturer and communist anti-colonial organizer, then as a woman who used the dungeon, the brothel, and the newspaper column to insist that SM, dildos, and trans desire belonged in public speech. For BDSM history she is a rare figure who actually worked as a dominatrix after a PhD, and who argued that playing with power roles could help someone decide whether to transition.
Amsterdam, Marriage, and a Mathematics Doctorate
Paërl was born in Amsterdam in 1935. At twenty-two she married Hetty Paërl (1931–2020). She trained as a mathematician, took her PhD in 1968, and became a university lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. The academic post is not a footnote to the later sex work: it is the first public identity she built, and mathematics stayed a source of motivation for the rest of her life even after the university let the contract lapse.
Provo, Communism, and the Suriname Committee
She became increasingly involved in Provo, the Dutch anarchist protest movement of the 1960s. Political work pulled her toward communism, a conviction she shared with Hetty. Together they served on the Suriname Committee, set up in 1970 to campaign for Suriname’s independence from the Netherlands and to show solidarity with Surinamese people living under neocolonial pressure. The committee published the Suriname Bulletin and pamphlets, made films, and ran lectures and training sessions meant to explain what the former colony was actually facing.
In that campaign Paërl wrote four books under her then legal name: Nederlandse Macht in de Derde Wereld (Dutch Power in the Third World, 1971), Klassenstrijd in Suriname (Class Struggle in Suriname, 1972), and Nationalisme of Klassenstrijd (Nationalism or Class Struggle, 1973). She also edited De Uitbuiting van Suriname (The Exploitation of Suriname, 1970), with M. Kross, E. Megens, and L. Willems. After independence in 1975 she refused the victory lap. Independence, she said, had to be the start of a long decolonial process. Large foreign companies were still extracting Suriname’s resources; until that stopped, formal sovereignty would stay hollow for the people who lived there.
Class Struggle in Suriname focused on a September 1971 strike meant to improve workers’ social and economic conditions. The book included a poster by Hetty: a grotesque ship standing for Dutch companies that hauled Surinamese resources away. Those texts were tied to real protests in the Netherlands that in turn fed Suriname’s own movements. Paërl’s larger argument was about class struggle in the Global South after World War II: Western states kept raw-material prices low for their own benefit, which kept producer countries from accumulating wealth. In Suriname, and among Surinamese immigrants in the Netherlands who faced racism, she also tracked how class and race locked together. The anti-colonial books are part of the same life as the later SM writing—she treated power as something you could name, whether it sat in a mining concession or a collar.
Transition, Cabaret, Brothel, and the Dungeon
Between 1978 and 1980 Paërl pursued gender transition in social, legal, and medical terms. She said she had been cross-dressing her entire life, but the desire to fully embody a feminine persona did not arrive until after she divorced Hetty. She began to enjoy sexually charged performance, went to cabarets around Rembrandtplein, bought a wig, and experimented with dressing up. Working as a sex worker in a brothel gave her, in her own account, a euphoric feeling: it was the first time she was accepted and approached as a woman on both a sexual and an emotional level. The emotions were not only about the sex.
She wrote about sadomasochism, argued for pornography, and worked to strip prejudice off transgender people, sex work, and sexual pleasure. She pushed public talk about kinks and dildos and got national attention on radio, in newspapers, on television, and in journals. She saw a live connection between BDSM and trans experience: investigating those roles through SM, she believed, could help someone decide whether or not to transition. After the University of Amsterdam did not renew her contract, she made a living as a journalist and as a dominatrix, with mathematics still in the background as a private engine. In 1986 she helped raise money for Amsterdam’s gay monument by offering her escort services.
Writing SM, Fetish, and Trans Life into Print
The later journalism is as specific as the Suriname books. In 1980 she published “Transsexuelen vaak miskend” in de Volkskrant; in 1981, “Transsexuelen” in De Waarheid. 1984 brought “Betty Paërl over transsexualiteit: de hermafroditische oplossing” in Prothese, a plea for sex-industry workers in De Waarheid, and “SM is een vorm van seksuele rebellie: het pervers-feminisme van Pat Califia” in Homologie—a Dutch doorway onto Califia’s argument that SM is sexual rebellion. The same year she published, with Califia and J. Arnone, “Vrouw-zijn is een maatschappelijke constructie” in Prothese. In 1985 Slechte Meiden ran her essay on fetishistic aspects of clothing; in 1987 Sek printed “Billen.” She also translated Califia’s “Zij imiteren precies de hetero’s: spelen met rollen en omkeringen” for Slechte Meiden in 1983.
Film stayed in the toolkit. She translated Klaus Unbehaun’s Perfecte Filmtrucs (1978) and wrote Geluidsfilm Handboek (1980) for Focus in Amsterdam. With Hetty she directed three 1973 films—Brokopondo, Mariënburg maakt zich vrij, and Rietkappers—which premiered at Cinestud in Amsterdam. The camera work belongs with the committee books: it is the same political project, not a hobby.
One Life, Two Publics
The bibliography is worth keeping attached to the dungeon years because Paërl did not treat them as a conversion story. De Uitbuiting van Suriname (Sun, Nijmegen, 1970), Nederlandse Macht in de Derde Wereld (Van Gennep, Amsterdam, 1971), Klassenstrijd in Suriname (Sun, 1972), and Nationalisme of Klassenstrijd (Nesbic-bulletin, Leiden, 1973) are the same author’s first public stack. Hetty’s grotesque-ship poster in the strike book is a reminder that the marriage was a working political partnership, not only a legal fact that ended before transition. The three 1973 films they directed together premiered at Cinestud in Amsterdam; the later Focus titles—Unbehaun’s Perfecte Filmtrucs in her translation, then her own Geluidsfilm Handboek—show she kept a technical film literacy after the committee years. When the University of Amsterdam declined to renew the lectureship, journalism and domination were the paid work that replaced it. Mathematics, she said, stayed a private motive anyway.
The Dutch queer and left press of the 1980s is where she did the kink pedagogy. de Volkskrant and De Waarheid got the early trans explainers (1980, 1981). Prothese got the “hermaphroditic solution” essay and the joint piece with Califia and Arnone on womanhood as a social construction. Homologie got the Califia “perverse feminism” frame that called SM sexual rebellion. Slechte Meiden got the clothing-fetish essay and her Califia translation on role-play and reversals. Sek got “Billen.” The 1984 De Waarheid plea for sex-industry workers belongs next to the 1986 escort work for the Amsterdam gay monument: she did not only defend the trade in print. She worked it, including as a dominatrix, and said the brothel was the first room in which she was approached as a woman sexually and emotionally. Cross-dressing had been lifelong; the decision to transition socially, legally, and medically (1978–1980) came after the divorce, with Rembrandtplein cabaret and a bought wig as the experimental staircase.
Paërl died in 2022. What she left kink readers is not a single manifesto but a through-line: a mathematician who organized for Surinamese independence, transitioned in public, took clients as a dominatrix, and used Dutch newspapers to say that SM, fetish clothing, and paid sex were tools of knowledge rather than scandals to be managed. The dungeon and the Suriname Committee were, in her practice, two ways of refusing other people’s definitions of who was allowed to have power.
