Soon after Ireland passed its Gender Recognition Act in 2015, Kevin Humphreys, a Labour politician, visited a residential home for senior citizens – where an older woman thanked him for the new law.
It was Humphreys who, as the minister of state for social protection 10 years ago, guided through the legislation that has meant transgender people in Ireland can apply to have their lived gender legally recognised by the state through a simple self-certification process.
“She was around 80,” Humphreys recalls, “and for the first time she was able to tell her friends and family she was transgender. She told me the relief she felt to be accepted by her own community, and by the state, in the last few years of her life.”
“We were very fortunate in Ireland that we were able to do the legislation in an era of openness and progressive discussion,” he says.
In stark contrast with Scotland, where attempts by the Holyrood parliament to introduce a similar model prompted an explosion of grassroots opposition, the Irish process was relatively smooth.
The bill passed a matter of months after the people of Ireland voted overwhelmingly to legalise same-sex marriage, which created “a whole moment socially around LGBT+ equality” says Daire Dempsey, the executive director of the Transgender Equality Network Ireland. This reflected a broader public desire to “move away from this vision of Ireland as a repressive, deeply Catholic place” and towards “a new sense of ourselves as a nation with modern, European values”, they add.
In recent years, however, a handful of women’s groups have started to question the “unintended consequences” of the act, reflecting the rise in gender-critical campaigning across the UK. In the recent Irish presidential election campaign, candidates were challenged with the “what is a woman?” question that dominated last year’s UK general election.
Thanks to the notorious case of Barbie Kardashian, a violent offender who changed their name by deed poll and obtained a gender recognition certificate in 2020, and was transferred from a women’s prison to a male one during their sentence, custody is now a focus of emerging gender-critical concerns. An amendment to the GRA, which would limit its scope so the certificate no longer changes sex for the purposes of imprisonment, has passed its first stage.
Barrister Laoise de Brun, who drafted the amendment, describes UK campaigners like the Sex Matters founder, Maya Forstater, as “an inspiration” who “created the framework for the fightback”.
De Brun, who runs The Countess, a non-profit advocating for women, children and families, wants to see all female-only spaces excluded from the act. “Currently the state’s hands are tied in so many areas and this would unlatch the rules for places like domestic violence refuges and toilets.”
“Lobbyists achieved what they hoped to with the passing of the act, and the public felt they were shaking off the dark Catholic past and marching forwards to a new progressive paradigm. But we’re marching off the edge of a cliff if the end result is that fundamental societal norms are to be junked.”
Dempsey and Humphreys frame the recent shift in different terms. “The rollback of rights and spread of misinformation about what a trans person is, which is happening globally,” says Dempsey, “we’re seeing some of that discourse starting to creep in here, though it hasn’t taken hold in the way that it has in the UK and in the US.”
Dempsey and Humphreys emphasise the “huge” amount of consultation undertaken before 2015, achieving an all-party consensus. The “very few” concerns Humphreys says were raised at the time about the impact on women-only spaces were met by building in a yearly review of the law.
Dublin’s Pride march in 2015, the same year a vote passed overwhelmingly to legalise same-sex marriage. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Getty Images
Una Mullally, the author of In the Name of Love: The Movement for Marriage Equality in Ireland, argues that mainstream Irish feminism has historically been more inclusive.
“There is a core of solidarity in Irish culture more generally that cuts across those lines of class and gender and doesn’t find itself entrenched in them as much as it does in Britain,” she says.
Mullally attended Dublin’s first Dyke March in more than 25 years earlier this year. “It was fully trans inclusive and there was this great sense of pride that cohesion and solidarity is being maintained,” she adds.
Over the decade, the numbers undertaking the process have been modest. A total of 1,881 certificates were granted up to the end of last year, with 17 applications refused, no revocations and annual applications levelling out in the low 300s. Over the years those changing gender from male to female have very slightly outnumbered those female to male.
The act also set out a separate process for 16- and 17-year-olds requiring parental consent and supporting documents from a doctor and psychiatrist, which has granted 24 certificates over the decade.
“It validates who I am,” says Ann, who received her Irish GRC in 2023 and describes the “simplicity” of posting her witnessed documents on a Monday and getting the certificate back on the Wednesday. “The big thing for me is having official documentation like a passport with the correct gender, which is comforting.”
“In terms of public perception of the act, I think most Irish people don’t care. They’re happy to let trans people get on with it.”
