Right to be recognised

Lydia Foy enunciates the words with a mock tone of lofty disapproval.

It’s how the former dentist, parent-of-two and accidental human rights campaigner sums up the way she has been viewed for almost two decades.

She changed her gender 18 years ago and in a flash, society, the state and the law changed its attitude to her. She was a bit of a freak, a curiosity, an embarrassment, a nuisance. Not socially acceptable.

Lydia smiles when she says the words now because at last it’s safe to smile. The Government has stopped trying to insist she is somebody she isn’t, the law should soon be changed to recognise and protect her identity and ultimately, she hopes, the last vestiges of society’s suspicions will disappear.

“I hope I can retire now,” she said yesterday of her unintended 17-year role as crusader for all those whose gender and/or sexual orientation has fallen outside traditional norms, and into what she calls the “spectrum of diversity that is human life”.

Lydia, 62, was born in Athlone, registered as a boy named Donal and set on a path to live as a male. For as long as she could she followed that path, marrying and fathering two children, all the while trying to push aside the feeling that she was meant to be a woman.

When finally she could no longer live a lie, she sought medical help, was diagnosed with gender identity disorder and, in 1992, underwent gender reassignment surgery.

But while her internal struggle ended, another battle began. She changed her name by deed poll but when she tried to get her birth cert altered to state her gender as female, she hit a brick wall.

In 1997, after four years of getting nowhere with the Registrar General, she went to the Free Legal Advice Centre to see if they could help. They agreed to try and got a case to the High Court in 2000, having to wait almost two years for a judgment.

The court was sympathetic but said its hands were tied. There was no way under existing legislation that it could order the Registrar General to recognise a change of gender.

It might have been different if the judgment had come two days later because a landmark ruling was delivered by the European Court of Human Rights, upholding the right of a British woman in a similar position to Lydia to receive a new birth cert.

The European Convention on Human Rights signed the following year enshrined that right into law – a law meant to be binding on all EU states – but it made no difference for Lydia.

She went back to the High Court, this time claiming Irish law was in breach of the European Convention and the court agreed. That was in 2007, however, and Lydia has been waiting ever since.

The Government decided to appeal the new ruling to the Supreme Court and that appeal was pending until yesterday when finally, the Government backed down and withdrew the appeal, effectively accepting the law must change and that Lydia must get her birth cert.

Thirteen years after she first went to court, Lydia could finally breath a sigh of relief. “Some people said I was very brave or very stupid,” she reflected yesterday. “I was neither – I was just in a corner and had nowhere else to go. There were many times I wanted to give up.”

That she didn’t give up was partly due to the perseverance of FLAC but mainly due to Lydia’s own driving desire to right a wrong. “A lot of it was about dignity. There have been quite a few incidences where human dignity and just feeling a valued member of the state were in jeopardy.”

There were practical difficulties too. “I have often been asked to put my name down on something as it appears on my birth cert. Even getting car insurance – men and women get quoted differently.

“It’s like you’re a lesser person, a sort of ‘see under sexually deviant’ attitude. These perceptions linger and it’s important that they be totally dispelled and you be recognised as an equal member of society.”

Lydia said she also felt relief for her family, whose privacy she has tried to protect, and for all the families dealing with the legal and emotional uncertainties of having a transgendered loved one.

There is still a long way to go. The law is not yet changed, it is not possible to have gender reassignment surgery in Ireland and it’s also difficult to access post-operative care on return from abroad.

But as far as social acceptability is concerned, take a peek at the Dublin Pride parade this Saturday. Lydia will be grand marshall. “They use a rainbow as a symbol,” she said. “They’ll have to add one more colour to the spectrum now.”