Lydia Foy has been fighting for her rights for the last decade, writes Carl O'Brien
Dr Lydia Foy has lived with rejection for most of her life.
"You feel completely on your own," she says. "I've had stones thrown at the house, people have called me names. I've been treated in a barbarically cruel way in the courts . . . It's tough being rejected by everyone: your family, your home town, your country."
Foy has a syndrome known as gender identity disorder, or dysphoria, a recognised medical condition that affects about one in 30,000 people where sufferers feel they are women trapped in men's bodies, or vice versa.
It's a condition that has cost her her job, her family and her privacy. Yet she never felt she had any option but to vindicate her rights as a person with what she calls a gender disability.
"It's always baffled me as to why society has been so hostile to people like me," says Foy, a former dentist now living on her own in a local authority house in Athy. "When people see exotic flowers, they're treasured and studied. Instead, I'm ridiculed."
Registered as Donal Mark Foy at birth, she has been engaged in a legal challenge over the last decade to be given a new birth certificate describing her as female.
From her youngest days she remembers feeling different from other boys and relating much more to girls.
"It wasn't a problem when I was very young. I was treated gently and I had a big curly head of hair. I remember on the day of my holy Communion, I loved the nice dresses and I wasn't allowed to have one. I just burst into tears." She says she had medical conditions associated with being female as a youngster, including scoliosis and skeletal disharmony.
Her parents worried about her, seeking psychological help, yet she says no one ever understood her condition. She was forced to stay in psychiatric hospitals on several occasions.
In later years, as she studied medicine, she began to read up on the condition, although medical textbooks tended to describe it as a form of sexual deviancy.
She later qualified as a dentist and went on to marry in 1977 and had two daughters. The torment over her gender identity always bubbled away in the background.
She prefers not to talk about her family, except to say that following a family court case she was left with barring orders preventing her from going within a mile of the home of her partner and daughters.
She was judicially separated in 1991. At various points she became suicidal, although she says the intervention and diagnosis of her condition by doctors in the UK played a key role in helping her to find the strength to keep going.
After living as a woman for a year, Foy underwent irreversible gender reassignment surgery in 1992 in an operation that was part-financed by the old Eastern Health Board.
She had worked as a qualified dentist but lost her job after her gender realignment.
Fifteen years later, life as a transgendered person is still difficult. She has managed to obtain some official documents in her name, such as her driving licence and, after a long battle, a passport. However, she is legally a male and suffers humiliation whenever she is asked to produce her birth certificate or proof of her age or date of birth.
In an ever-more regulated world where proof of identity is required for routine transactions, formal recognition of gender reassignment has become increasingly important for her.
Irish authorities have repeatedly refused to provide her with a birth certificate, even as other European countries began to take progressive steps to protect the rights of transgendered people.
Today, Ireland and Lithuania are the only EU states that do not officially recognise transgendered or transsexual people.
Even when the Government was urged by a High Court judge five years ago to "urgently review" Ireland's lack of legislation to protect the rights of transgendered people, nothing was done.
With the support of the Free Legal Advice Centre, Foy has kept her legal battle going for a decade. Yesterday's ruling is a major step forward for her in helping to ensure she is treated as a full and equal Irish citizen.
"It's more than just a birth cert," she says. "It means my family know my condition is genuine. It makes medical people recognise that this is real. And it means that the human rights of people like me, and others with disabilities, need to be respected.
"Maybe now we can really begin to respect diversity, in all its forms."