My name is Lydia Foy,
I'm here near the four courts
in Dublin, in Ireland
and I've been
battling
to get basic rights before the law for very many years
.
What happened to me was I was born with
a syndrome which
originally used to be called transexual 
syndrome but unfortunetly terminology
was
destroyed
when there were some controversial
cases
so people just casually dropped the 
syndrome which is a medical term
and just start calling people
who were born with a gender disability, just calling them transexuals, it
 just
trivialized the disability and alienated. FLAC has represented 
Dr. Lydia Foy for more than twelve years
and what happened was that
after her personal experiences of 
transgender and transitioning she was then
looking for legal recognition because there are a 
lot of circumstances in which
she might be asked to produce a birth
 certificate which would show a different
gender from the gender she was presenting as, which was very embarrassing
and also as a form of affirmation 
and recognition of her new identity which
is very important
but she got nowhere so it became clear
 that she would have to take legal action
.
She came to FLAC to help her with 
that. It took five years to get a
decision on that in the high court
and the decision went against her. The European Court of Human Rights two days
l
later
gave a decision in favor of transgendered people from Britain
under exactly the same law
so we appealed that to the Supreme Court. It 
took another three years for that to come up in
the Supreme Court
by that time the law here had changed 
and we had brought the European Convention of
Human Rights into our domestic law and it 
provided an opportunity to test this new
law in her case
and we eventually won in two thousand and seven but we're now in a
situation where the state has appealed the
 positive decision in the high court in this
case, and we will have to fight that in the Supreme Court
and may well have to take it to the European Courts as well.
FLAC is an organization that has
has a huge dependence on the voluntary involvement of practicing 
lawyers.
We have about seventy centers around the
 country which we support
we organize twenty one of them
 directly, others are organized through
the Citizens Information Centers of Ireland
but the purpose of our centers and 
the work in the centers is that people
who need legal information and legal advice 
can get it in a non-threatening way, in
a confidential way and in a way
 that just gives them appropriate access
so we like to see FLAC as an 
organization which can use law and 
legal tools as a
catalyst
for social change, social justice.
