Activist Hugh Murphy has released ‘Trans and Proud: LGBTQ+ rights in Ireland’, a short documentary as part of the This Is Me campaign. The short film is in large part an interview with trans activist Noah Halpin and draws attention to both how fair LGBTQ+ rights have come in Ireland, but moreover what still needs to be done in order to guarantee the necessary changes are made.

To begin with, Hugh queries Noah on how Ireland as a country is in relation to trans rights. Noah explains that although societally Ireland as a whole is fairly accepting and open to transgender people as opposed other countries, specifically mentioning the UK, he says that healthcare and access to healthcare is the area that needs the most improvement in Ireland in regards to trans rights.

Noah then goes into detail about the long and arduous process that trans people are required to go through in order to even get a prescription for hormones, explaining that due to both the extreme waiting lists and improper conduct of the national gender service, it can take around three years for someone to be prescribed hormones, and that’s if everything runs smoothly. However, Noah explained that you can be delayed for a multitude of reasons or even out-right denied services, describing it as “the psychiatric team at the national gender service playing god with people’s healthcare.”

The interview continues and the pair discuss all the progress that has been made thus fair for the LGBTQ+ community in Ireland as a whole, but more specifically in regard to trans and gender non-conforming individuals. While Noah and other activists had made huge leaps, even working with former Health Minister Simon Harris who was according to Noah “extremely receptive” to concerns raised by the group and even went as far as to offer Noah a position as a ministerial appointee, which he accepted.

Unfortunately despite the committee having been created and concluded after months of work, COVID-19 say proceedings come to a halt in March and none of the discussed changes have been made as of yet. 

The difficulty now is that the current Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly has not been as receptive as Simon Harris. As of the filming of the video, the group has reached out to Minister Donnelly with no response.

The video ends with Noah promising the young people of Ireland that the This Is Me campaign will continue the fight:

“We’ll never let it happen that there’s zero access for people, and I promise that. We will never, ever let it happen that people will have nowhere to go. We will continue to try and grow services for HRT, put them outside of this one centralized location, put them into the community, we don’t need to be in hospitals for something GPs give to cisgender people every single day.”

The short film ‘Trans and Proud: LGBTQ+ rights in Ireland’ is available to watch in full here: