Founder of the trans youth service GenderJam NI, and the Belfast Trans Resource Centre through SAIL NI, trans rights and disability rights advocate Ellen Murray has recently joined the ine folk at TENI as Policy And Research Officer.

I’ve lived in Belfast all my life. grew up in Andersonstown and went to an all-boys primary school.

There’s no real answer to when I first started to feel didn’t identify with my assigned gender. It was something that was really gradual. I came across the word trans when was about 15 but knew before then.

The support that was looking for in my local community it was quite frustrating because anything available was for much older adults.

Getting GenderJam off the ground was a case of posting on Tumblr to see if anyone who was trans and young wanted to get a cup of tea and chat about whatever. The turn out was pretty good so we started doing it regularly. It became pretty clear that we needed to set up something more formal. GenderJam was operating out of cafes, so that was the main reason for the Belfast Trans Resource Centre. We weren’t expecting to be able to open a community centre, we were expecting to open an office and it just happened that this long term project became more feasible.