In January hundreds of people took to the streets to protest a lack of adequate access to healthcare for trans people in Ireland. While nine new trans healthcare workers are currently being put into place, two of the leading Irish clinicians in the area say they will not be using the treatment model that the government, HSE and TENI recongise as best practice. Stephen McCabe reports on a contraction at the heart of trans healthcare in Ireland.

Access to healthcare for trans people received a wave of coverage following a protest in Dublin last January. The protest hoped to highlight what organisers said is the abject failure of the state to provide adequate access to healthcare.

Trans people looking to access healthcare in the country have always faced a Herculean task. There are only two gender clinics in the state, In Galway and Dublin; they’re both considerably under-resourced, and patients can expect to wait at least a year before accessing endocrine services

In many ways, this is because of an overly medicalised model of treatment where patients must present themselves to their GP to be referred to mental health professionals. They then must obtain a specific psychiatric diagnosis to be referred on to a specialised service which will only accept diagnoses from a limited number of specialists, which it claims is essential to ensuring unfit people don’t transition.

310 patients currently attend at Loughlinstown, Dublin and 70 in Galway, with around 120 people awaiting appointments in Dublin and 40 in Galway. Wait times can range from anything from six months to a year, and often longer, and concerns have been raised about the impact these delays have on the mental health and wellbeing of trans people, along with questions about the suitability of the model being practiced at the clinics.