Noah Halpin, founder and manager of the This Is Me Transgender Healthcare Campaign, joins Dr Helen and Marianne to discuss the current state of trans healthcare in Ireland. Together they discuss the importance of fighting for best practice, person-centred healthcare for all transgender and non-binary people, and what this means in reality.
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Links:
Follow Noah on Twitter: @Noah_Halpin
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The GenderGP Podcast
The Future of Transgender Healthcare - Noah Halpin
Hello, this is Dr. Helen Webberley, welcome to our GenderGP podcast, where we will be discussing some of the issues affecting the trans and nonbinary community in the world today together with my cohost Marianne Oakes, a trans woman herself and our head of therapies.
Noah:
Thanks, Helen. Thanks for having me on, um, my name is Noah Halpin and I'm the founder of the this is me transgender healthcare campaign. So what we do is we fight for best practice person centered health care for all trans and nonbinary people in Ireland. And we continue to do that every, every single day of the year.
Helen:
Brilliant. So, okay. Um, what, what do you mean by best practice? What do you mean by person centered and pick those things for us? What does that actually mean in everyday life.
Noah:
In Ireland, um, the one service that provides healthcare to trans and nonbinary people, they operate off a model of care that was created solely by the clinic themselves. There's no evidential basis for their model of care. It's very much a psychiatric model of care. So we strive have international best practice, uh, model of care introduced into Ireland, which would be in our WPATH, the world association for transgender health, um, based on an informed consent model so that people are believed as opposed to having to prove themselves. And so this is, this is what we strive for in Ireland and person centered being that, that the person themselves are, are at the forefront of their own treatment and, and not decisions being made by, uh, like I said, psychiatrist's opinions of what these people are very, very close to.
Helen:
Um, I can see you smiling. They're very, very close to the attitude of GenderGP. Isn't it? What do these words mean to you? Best practice to monitor them?
Marianne:
Oh, I was going to say, sounds like you've been reading the GenderGP script there because that's what's going through my mind when he was talking though, was how are you finding effecting change? You know, is it a people open to listening and believing, or are you finding that there's resistance?
Noah:
What I find mostly obviously the trans community are very much on board and want change. A lot of families of young trans people are, are similar. I'm finding a very kind of 50/50 split down the middle when it comes to politicians,