Marja Lust carries her iPhone without a case. She listens closely and answers without rushing. Her attention never appears scattered, even when the room is. Marja gives off the presence of someone you would trust with your life: calm, collected, observant, diligent in every movement. Nothing seems in danger of being dropped – not the phone, not the conversation, not the responsibility that has been placed in her hands.

We are sitting in an Amsterdam pub, where a birthday party is slowly taking over the room beside us. Chairs scrape against the floor. People arrive in waves. Glasses touch tables, conversations rise and every few minutes I glance down at the recording equipment to confirm that the noise-cancelling microphone is still winning its fight against the celebration.

By the time I sit down with Marja in Amsterdam Nieuw-West, I have already been describing her to friends as a Dutch Olivia Benson. The comparison makes her laugh. She has, in fact, encountered Mariska Hargitay twice in Central Park in New York. The comparison is imperfect. Olivia Benson carries the concentrated moral authority of a fictional television character whose cases have already been written and solved. Marja spent years doing the work in the real world as a criminal investigator along with her work for the queer community, countering a system where police institutions had historically surveilled queer people, recorded their names, invaded their spaces, and failed them when they asked for protection often contributing to their harm instead.

At one point, midway through recounting her years in criminal investigation, community policing and international human-rights organizing, she pauses to ask whether I need something to eat. It is a minor detail that lends itself to her character – though it may not always show outwardly, there is a steady warmth that notices what another person might need, often responding before being asked.

Roze In Blauw: Amsterdam in the 1990s

Nightlife was part of the infrastructure. Before social media made it possible to find a network without leaving home, bars and women’s evenings were where people met, shared information, argued, flirted, organized and discovered that they were not alone. Marja remembers arranging her police roster to ensure that she could attend those evenings herself.

Her twin sister Ellie – also a badass crime fighting lesbian – was chairwoman of the Roze In Blauw initiative, an LGBTQ community task force within the Amsterdam police department focused on rebuilding trust, made up of officers identifying as queer. Marja played a key part, designing the slogan “Proud To Be Your Friend” ahead of the 1998 Gay Games held in Amsterdam.

Coasters appeared on tables in Amsterdam’s queer bars, beneath sweating beer glasses and drinks abandoned for the dance floor. Printed on them was a 24/7 telephone number LGBTQ people could call when they were victims of discrimination or another crime. The coasters were small enough to slip into a pocket. That was part of their usefulness. A person did not have to publicly declare that they needed help. They could take the number home and make the decision later.

Marja was often the one answering the phone calls late into the night. On the other end might be someone living through one of their worst moments —hurt, frightened and unsure whether contacting the police would make the situation safer or expose them to further humiliation. When that person called, someone answering from their own community becomes essential. The victim may not have to explain every coded remark, hidden relationship or reason for waiting before making a report. The officer already understands the context. Recognition creates comfort, but it can also produce better investigative work.

“I think it is very important that, to lower the threshold for people to come to the police, you need to proactively go out and connect with your community,” she says. People need to know there is somewhere safer to come forward after something happens “behind closed doors or within the public arena.”

Roze in Blauw entered those spaces carrying both the authority of the police and the burden of police history.

Some queer people welcomed them. Others were openly hostile to the idea of police entering LGBTQIA+ venues. Marja did not require anyone to forget the past before needing help in the present. Whatever larger argument existed about policing, there was a person on the other end who had been harmed, frightened or humiliated and had decided to trust somebody enough to call.

Marja understands that systemic change rarely comes from one direction. She brought together law enforcement professionals from 26 countries as the founder of the first World LGBT Conference for Criminal Justice Professionals – including many countries where LGBTQ people had little or no legal protections at all. She expanded her perspective and fought for diversity initiatives for all marginalized groups as an Amsterdam city council member.  Outside pressure must move alongside people working within institutions – people capable of carrying an idea from the margins, through layers of resistance, and toward those with the power to make it permanent.

When Justice Becomes Injustice, Resistance Becomes Duty

For Marja, power and authority are not instruments of control, nor do they entitle anyone to blind obedience. Power, leadership and justice carry a civic responsibility: to humanize institutions, protect the people within their reach and make equality more than an abstract promise.

When I ask where her sense of justice came from, Marja says, “It’s not something I do, it relates to who I am.”

Marja’s grandfather was a leader in the Dutch Resistance. Her mother was eleven years old when the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands began. Her grandfather would sometimes have her mother smuggle munitions past Nazi checkpoints because a German soldier was far less likely to search a young girl than a grown man. Her grandfather and mother were willing to risk everything for the freedom of their people.

“She was awesome,” Marja recounts, reflecting on her mother’s bravery. Years later, she told Marja that she could not imagine asking her own children to do the same. “But times were different then,” Marja says simply.

“Where justice becomes injustice, resistance becomes duty.” The translation of the words are engraved on the Resistance monument in the town of Oostzaan where she grew up. The bronze monument depicts a chair with a dead bird lying across it, chained and unable to fly. It was created to honor those who died in the war for the Resistance, and a reminder that freedom and justice must continually be defended.

The war ended, but her mother’s sense of civic responsibility did not. She volunteered for women’s organizations, collected money door to door for cancer research and participated in a Dutch programme for women’s health.

Service was not treated in their family as something exceptional or performed for recognition. It was simply part of how a person moved through the world: noticing where help was needed and accepting some responsibility for providing it.

The quote on the monument in Oostzaan offers a way of understanding the path Marja would later take through policing, politics and human-rights advocacy. She has spent much of her career working inside institutions while remaining willing to challenge them when their actions no longer matched the principles they claimed to uphold.

Her family history taught her that justice may require courage, sacrifice and intervention on behalf of people outside one’s immediate circle. Her career would teach her something else: resistance from the outside is essential, but the mechanism of institutional change also must be moved from within.

Turning the Gear: Institutional Change in Law Enforcement

Marja learned those institutional mechanisms from within the Amsterdam Police Department where she served for sixteen years as a criminal investigator earning the rank of Police Lieutenant.

During those early years, Marja and her colleagues designed covers for their bulletproof vests identifying them as Roze in Blauw and paid for the covers themselves. Police uniforms are meant to be uniform, but the officers needed people in queer bars and at events to understand immediately who they were – one of them.

“If you have to wait for approval, you can wait forever,” Marja says. Noting that Roze In Blauw often didn’t wait for formal approval. “We just did it.”

The philosophy was simple: start the work. Should somebody in authority later order them to stop, they could apologize. Nobody did.

She speaks warmly about many of the people she worked with. Marja remembers a gay colleague who had spent years believing he was the only one in an organization employing thousands of people. He was not. The silence around him had merely made that loneliness plausible.

“You may think you’re the only one,” Marja says, “but you are probably not.”

It is important that a network makes people visible to one another. Once they can see one another, people can organize.

“I have never met more kind and well-meaning people than I did within the Amsterdam Police Department,” she says.

Her affection for her former colleagues does not prevent her from being clear-eyed about the institution itself. Much of Roze in Blauw’s labor has been performed by officers alongside their primary jobs. When senior police leadership changed, Roze in Blauw sometimes had to explain its reason for existing all over again to someone newly seated. Years of work could be reduced to a presentation for an official asking why LGBTQ+ people needed a specialized point of contact.

The organization could display Roze in Blauw when an anti-LGBTQ+ incident drew public attention. Yet, behind that public image, volunteers were still fighting for time, resources and permanent structural support.

The problem was not simply whether an institution supported equality in principle. The question was whether that support had been embedded deeply enough to survive a change of leadership, a budget negotiation or the departure of the people who first carried the work.

Her answer was not to abandon the work at the first sign of hypocrisy. It was to keep pressing until the structure beneath the image became stronger.

How to gain institutional support has taken a lifetime of learning, but Marja has learned that moral urgency alone does not always move the people controlling an institution’s policies and resources.

To win their support, she advises advocates to make inclusion “a business issue” for stakeholders, not something that could be perceived as soft or ceremonial, but something directly connected to the institution’s ability to do its job. A police force that reflects the community it serves can reach people who might otherwise never report a crime, recognize information another investigator may miss and resolve cases more effectively. The human element remains the reason for the work, presenting its practical value is how Marja gets decision-makers to listen.

An LGBTQIA+ officer might understand the significance of a coded insult, an unspoken relationship or the fear behind a delayed report. The victim or witness does not have to begin by teaching the investigator an entire culture before the investigation can move forward.

Marja remembers investigative teams asking Roze in Blauw officers to assist in cases involving the death of a gay man. The initial investigators sensed that important information was present, but they were not reaching it. The Roze In Blauw officers asked different questions, which helped the investigation progress. That lived experience provided more expertise, giving institutional leaders a concrete reason to make their presence permanent.

Empowering Others to Act on a Global Stage

In 2016, during EuroPride, Marja founded and directed the first World LGBT Conference for Criminal Justice Professionals. Police officers, prosecutors, justice officials and human-rights advocates came from 26 countries, including Pakistan, South Africa, Montenegro, Uganda and Australia.

Organizing it “damn near killed me,” she laughs.

It was also a phenomenal success.

Marja built the conference around two objectives: connect and inspire. But inspiration, in her view, was only useful if it produced action.

“I want everybody to go home and do one thing.” Act.

For one officer, that might mean challenging a colleague who made a derogatory remark. A person with greater authority might change a policy affecting LGBTQIA+ employees. Someone else might establish an internal network, contact community leaders or create a safer way for victims to report harm.

The size of the action mattered less than whether someone left believing they possessed both the responsibility and the ability to take it.

Three weeks after the conference, Marja received a message from a Middle Eastern human-rights lawyer who had attended. The experience had given him the courage to come out to the other lawyers in his delegation.

“That was it for me,” Marja remembers knowing in that moment the conference had been a success. The conference had not changed every institution represented in the room. It had changed what one person believed he could do within his own life and professional community.

Then the work continued without needing Marja at its center. Toronto followed Amsterdam, then Melbourne and Austin. Another conference is planned for Vancouver in 2027.

What began in an office in Amsterdam became an international network. People found one another, shared strategies and carried the work into institutions shaped by vastly different legal, political and cultural realities.

Marja had not given them a single solution. She had given them access to one another.

Expanding Understanding of Discrimination

Her move into Amsterdam politics expanded her ability to continue uplifting others, advocating for anti-discrimination policy alongside animal welfare and neighborhood responsibilities. She entered politics with a public identity closely connected to LGBTQIA+ safety, but the work brought her into deeper contact with forms of discrimination that were not her own.

Her responsibilities extended beyond the people who had voted for her. She wanted to finish her term able to say that Amsterdam itself had made progress.

In council, Marja learned more about antisemitism, anti-Black racism, anti-Asian discrimination and anti-Muslim hostility. The population of Amsterdam had changed significantly since she started her advocacy in the 2000s, and Marja adapted to meet the needs of those she served. She became particularly conscious of Muslim women whose hijabs made their faith visible, which made them easier to target.

Her sense of justice widened as she encountered more people and listened to their stories.

Her experience also changed what she was asking the police to build. For years, she had advocated for a full-time operational Roze in Blauw unit—officers who could take the initial call, receive the report, investigate the case and remain in contact with the victim.

Through politics, that proposal grew into the idea of a broader operational anti-discrimination unit drawing expertise from multiple internal police networks.

An LGBTQIA+ officer might understand homophobic or transphobic violence. A Black officer might recognize the dynamics of anti-Black racism. A Jewish officer might hear the context within an antisemitic threat. A Muslim officer might understand why a particular act carried meaning that an outsider could miss.

Her understanding of how institutional bias operated had expanded, but the principle remained the same: people are more likely to trust an institution when somebody inside it recognizes them as part of their own community.

At Marja’s final city council meeting, Amsterdam’s mayor agreed to discuss the proposal with the police chief. It was the kind of change Marja had pushed for from within the police and continued pursuing through another institutional route once she had retired.

It was not a cinematic ending, but the heavy gear of institutional change had moved another notch.

“You don’t get rich on being a city council member,” Marja says, “but it is enriching.”

The work, she says, made her a better person and strengthened her sense of justice.

WorldPride Amsterdam Human Rights Conference 2026

Through a lifetime of continual learning and advocating for human rights – Marja now serves as Project Secretary for the WorldPride Amsterdam 2026 Human Rights Conference.

There may be no role better suited to the person who has spent her life connecting people, tracking moving parts, making sure the larger ideas and mission does not fall between the cracks.

The conference will take place from August 5th – August 7th at the Beurs van Berlage. Its programme brings together activists, policymakers, political leaders, academics and young changemakers across four broad areas: Rights and Governance, Health and Wellbeing, Heritage and Culture, and Resources and Leadership.

The theme of WorldPride Amsterdam 2026 is Unity.

Unity does not mean pretending the circumstances are equal. A participant may spend several celebratory days in Amsterdam and then return to a country where being publicly LGBTQIA+ threatens their family, employment, freedom or life. A strategy available to an Amsterdam activist may be unthinkable elsewhere.

People need tools they can carry home. They need relationships that survive the closing session. They need to know whom they can call six months later when the work becomes frightening or lonely.

“What we want to do is empower participants,” Marja says, “give them a wonderful experience, give them a really strong sense of community,” and offer something useful in the realities to which they will return.

When Marja and I spoke, organizers had received nearly 400 conference content proposals. Many addressed similar problems from different countries, disciplines and lived experiences. Rather than allowing each proposal to remain inside its own territory, the team looked for ways to combine overlapping submissions and place multiple perspectives in the same session.

Her hope is that they feel connected during the conference and “stay connected after the conference—to people that they had never met before.”

The mission carries over from the first LGBTQ+ Criminal Justice Professional conference ten years before: connect people, inspire them, send them home prepared to do one thing – act.

Marja’s career does not read as a linear progression from athlete to police officer to global organizer and politician. It is a continuing education in what is required to get people to act from a place of trust and integrity in order to enact institutional change. “You may think you’re the only one,” she says, “but you are probably not.”

As for sapphic women entering policing with an authentic sense of justice and a desire to help, Marja’s message is direct: “We need you.”

“If there is not something like [Roze In Blauw] yet – then start something like that.”

The Eternal Setter: A Lifetime of Assists

Near the end of our conversation, the party beside us is still going. Though her time as a city council member is over, she still takes a moment to make a human connection with the people she served for decades even as a police officer.

Her work has required years of carrying fragile things through difficult institutions: a frightened person’s trust, an officer’s decision to come out, a new network without formal support, an international conference, a proposal waiting for the mayor, hundreds of ideas competing for space inside three days.

She carries them carefully, but not timidly.

Marja was one of the first women to have an opportunity to go to university on scholarship in the United States after the landmark Title IX ruling, passed in 1972, prohibited gender discrimination in federally funded schools and required universities to provide women with equal athletic opportunities. 

She was a legendary volleyball player, and her records for assists (5th All Time) at St. Cloud State University still stand. The setter in volleyball watches the whole court. They’re the maestro. They playmaker always in motion. Her movement calculating, in an instant cushioning the ball. The perfect set. The perfect assist.

Marja Lust has spent a lifetime creating the conditions under which other people can score. Answer the call, enter the room, speak the truth and take the next action – Marja places possibility where teammates can reach it.

The final point may belong to someone else. The policy may be implemented by another leader. The network may eventually become so normalized that only few in a new generation know where it began.

But none of that happens without the set up, the assist, the person proud to be your friend.