The National Gender Service are messy bitches who love drama

About a month ago R.T.É. Prime Time published an article announcing that the Irish Nation Gender Service (N.G.S.) would be closing its waiting list to new adult patients¹. That evening an episode of Prime Time aired that discussed this and featuring an interview with the N.G.S.’s Paul Moran². The programme made something very clear: This was not really an announcement about the closure of a service, this was a publicity stunt intended to put pressure on the Health Service Executive (H.S.E.) to try and get the N.G.S. more funding. Junior minister for health Jennifer Murnane O’Connor appeared on the show being asked to comment on the announcement, which apparently was sent to the H.S.E. only that day in coordination with Prime Time. The next day the H.S.E. issued statements that the N.G.S. did not have the authority to unilaterally close itself to new patients in a hissy fit. As far as I’m aware there has not been any clarification of what trans people are meant to do about all this since.

The article notes that the waiting list had about 2,470 people on it the waiting time was four and a half years. This is somewhat misleading. They are currently seeing people from about that long ago, but if you are referred now then, at current rates, you will not be seen for well over a decade. The N.G.S. is well over capacity and has been for many years, now. They want more staff, they want their own building. The article notes that they currently operate out of two prefabs. From my experience with them I was mostly seem in regular rooms so they certainly have other hospital resources available to them, but perhaps it is the case that they only have those two prefabs available for their exclusive use. Several larger sites have been explored to house the N.G.S. but each time plans have fallen through, which Paul Moran asserted no blame laid for with the N.G.S. themselves.

I am not inclined to be charitable to Paul Moran or the National Gender Service—I have written them before—but it’s not really hard to believe that the H.S.E. is capable of fucking up such efforts on their own without the N.G.S.’s help. Regardless, I found myself extremely frustrated with the framing chosen by Moran and allowed by Prime Time: That the solution to the problem with the inadequacies of transgender healthcare in Ireland is the further expansion of the N.G.S., not more clinics, not G.P.- and patient-led care, not informed consent or international best practises. They want to be cemented as the centralised arbiters of gender for the whole country, just as their self-declared name implies.

And they want to be left alone while they do this, complaining about being intrusively filmed while asking completely unintrusive questions about people’s Tinder hookups, dismissing anyone who does not want to talk about whether they want to be penetrated or not with a doctor they have just met as “not ready for life-changing treatments”.

There is, perhaps, some hope that a different model of care might be pursued. Another junior minister travelled it Iceland recently to examine their informed consent model of care and some opposition T.D.s have been highlighting the awful state of trans healthcare in the Dáil, but I expect any increase in agency or dignity for trans people is going to be fought kicking and screaming by the men who have gone to court to try to stop trans children being referred for care.

If you want to keep up on any news about trans healthcare in Ireland I recommend Trans Healthcare Action’s newsletter, Trasinscnuacht.