Law — Rights — Inclusion

KNOWLEDGE-IS-POWER

Last year saw the launch of the Know Your Rights guide, Ireland’s first comprehensive guide dedicated to outlining the legal rights and supports of trans and nonbinary people. To have a better understanding of how this resource was created, Beatrice Fanucci spoke to the people who worked behind the scenes to make it happen.

Part of the broader Know Your Rights project launched by the Irish Council of Civil Liberties (ICCL) in 2010, the guide for trans and non-binary people was born out of a conversation between Luna Lara Liboni from ICCL (now Research and Policy Manager at TENI), Executive Director of TENI Daire Dempsey, and Executive Director of ShoutOut Ruadhán Ó Críodáin.

“We live in such a fractious moment, in terms of people’s access to or knowledge of their rights, and the erosion of those rights, very notably in the UK and in the US. And maybe a lack of awareness of what our rights here in Ireland are, and in what ways our rights are protected,” said Daire. “That’s what we set out to do: to have that information in one place, in a way that’s accessible.”

Using a question-and-answer format, the guide is divided into four broad sections. The first one provides information on legal gender recognition and name change, as well as details on the rights of parents of trans children. Section two contains information about gender-affirming care and general healthcare for trans people. The third section outlines information about equality, safety and daily life, containing insight about a person’s rights with the Gardaí, protections against violence and discrimination and more. The fourth and final part of the guide is dedicated to the rights of young trans people, including details about legal gender recognition, healthcare and school.

“There is often a lack of clarity and of consideration given to people who exist outside of binary definitions of gender, or who are moving between legal definitions of gender,” Daire said. “Having one place that is dedicated to naming where that lack of clarity is, and obviously also where there is clarity, was something that people were really needing and wanting, and something that we were able to do in the guide.”

Echoing these words, Ruadhán said: “We’ve had some good feedback from community members around demystifying some of the more complex processes, like how you change your name through ‘use and repute’, or Deed Pull, and trying to minimise the administrative burdens around those as well.

“Because a lot of the time when you’re starting out transitioning, all of these options and all this information is too overwhelming to take on at once. So I think for some people, it’s been really useful to be able to have it in one place, and to realise that some of it will be very expensive and some of it will be challenging, but some of it is more straightforward than it might immediately appear.”

Executive Director of ICCL Joe O’Brien, who also worked on the project, spoke about the relevance of the guide in current times and why it is such an important resource. “Everyone needs to read this guide. If everyone read this guide, we would live in a different society tomorrow,” he said. “There are an awful lot of people who just don’t understand and don’t have any kind of everyday knowledge of trans people and what they face. And this isn’t a substitute for that, but I think it’s a little step in the right direction.”

Ruadhán added: “The guide is ostensibly for trans and non-binary people as a resource, but I would say that the people who really need to read the guide are employers, doctors, medical professionals and parents.”

Daire spoke about how an important goal of the guide is to show people “how the rights of trans people are also just the rights of people more broadly”.

“There’s always a really important piece of work that happens when we talk about trans and non-binary people, especially in the current social and political moment, when so much of the discourse is trying to make trans and nonbinary people seem like the extreme margin cases or the extreme other. And I think it’s really important for any of us working towards justice for our communities, to ground our rights in the rights of all people.”

Ruadhán added, “Oftentimes, as organisations, we try to frame vindicating trans rights or helping trans people to access their rights as a form of allyship, but we really wanted to stress to the community that there is also legal recourse to having your rights supported and upheld in all kinds of spaces.

“I think it’s useful, particularly for the community, to know that if you are discriminated against, if you do face discrimination, there are so many avenues available to you. We talk a lot about community supports, and we’re lucky within the community that we have the likes of TENI, ShoutOut, Belong To, LGBT Ireland… But I don’t know if we talk enough about more formal, more established supports, like the Ombudsman for Children, like the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC).

“And the only way we know that those avenues work is because people before us have been brave enough to take cases forward, whether that was Lydia Foy or whether that was some of the people who have taken workplace discrimination cases. We were only able to speak about what that might look like in practice within the guide because of the people who have taken that path. So it’s worth understanding those routes and understanding how people have had their rights vindicated through those pathways, to be reassured that you’re not without hope or without options in a really horrible situation.”

One of the cases that they analysed during the drafting of the guide was brought to the WRC by a trans man who was restricted from volunteering in a youth organisation when his identity was leaked. “There were debates held about his eligibility or suitability to volunteer with young people,” Ruadhán explained. “And it’s such a depressing and upsetting situation for any trans or non-binary person to hear about or to read about. It feels so inherently transphobic, and it’s a real call back to 1980s homophobia.

“He’s an example of a person who pursued that at the WRC, who fought to have his rights recognised and vindicated, even though the whole situation must have been so distressing for him. I think just considering the people behind the cases and the mechanisms that we talk about in the guide was really important.”

Barristers who ran the FLAC LGBTQI+ Legal Clinic provided support to the authors of the guide. “We felt really lucky to be able to rely on the barristers who worked with us in a primarily voluntary capacity,” Ruadhán said. “FLAC were really influential in securing Gender Recognition in Ireland. FLAC supported Lydia Foy through her case, and she couldn’t have done it without their support.”

Due to lack of funding, the clinic is no longer in operation, meaning the LGBTQ+ community has one less vital resource. FLAC’s Chief Executive, Eilis Barry, has said it is “vitally important that Ireland’s specialised equality body, IHREC (the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission) – exercises its statutory powers to provide information and guidance to the public, students, the Department and to schools on their equality obligations towards trans and non-binary people.”

“A Code of Practice in this area would be very useful,” she said.

When it came to drafting the Know Your Rights section on healthcare, the guide’s authors encountered a positive surprise with one of the services they mentioned. “The National Screening Service gave us really comprehensive and thoughtful information about all of the ways they work to ensure that trans men and trans women still access the cancer screening that is essential for them,” Ruadhán explained. “When the trans healthcare outlook is so bleak in so many different ways, it’s quite reassuring to know that at least one service is thinking so comprehensively, but also thinking in an innovative way about how to make sure that all patients are protected. It’s a good model for other services to look at in terms of that inclusive approach to service design.”

Another surprising aspect that came up in the creation of the guide concerned trans and non-binary people in Northern Ireland, who don’t have the same access to gender recognition that Irish trans and non-binary people do. “That is a real violation of the rights of Irish citizens living in Northern Ireland,” Ruadhán said. “That’s something that should have been repaired within updating and amending the Gender Recognition legislation.”

Expanding on this, Daire said: “The gender recognition process in the UK is so restrictive, but also shouldn’t be the only recourse to gender recognition for Irish citizens in the North.” Daire spoke about how “that border becomes harder depending on your identity. As a trans person, you will have a potentially very different experience of crossing that border, even though it doesn’t physically exist. Your rights become very different and potentially much more restricted as you cross that border.”

The Know Your Rights guide provides a comprehensive overview of the rights of the community in the country, as well as accessible information for processes that directly impact their lives. The project was funded by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) as part of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Grants Scheme. You can access the guide by scanning the QR code below.