Eleanor is a beautiful soul with a huge heart and the best of intentions. Through her work in the trans community in Limerick, she regularly offers peer support to others who are following a similar journey to her own. Eleanor describes Limerick as having a great artistic, queer community that she’s very proud to be a part of. Even though, very surprisingly, Limerick doesn’t have any dedicated gay bars.

“The trans community in particular is great, there’s about 100 of us, and we all have an online group together where we stay in contact. I think it's really important because when I came out, I didn't know any other trans people, no one to really relate to who would understand what I was going through.”

As you can probably imagine, coming out as trans in rural Ireland was not without its issues.

“Coming out to my family wasn't great. My dad still uses my old name and my mom tried a little bit, but overall they weren't very good about it. They still aren't very good about it. As annoying as that is, it's kind of led me to be more involved with the community because I know what it was like not to have that support.”

Eleanor came out at trans when she was 25, 4 years ago, but she’s not holding her breath to see a specialist in Ireland. “The way you get trans health care in Ireland is if you do it the official way and to do that, you have to go to the National Gender Services, which has a wait list of, I think, 18 years at this point.”

She tells me that many trans people are forced to use online services that don’t come with doctor supervision or continuity of care. The other option is to take their hormone treatments into their own hands and “DIY” it. If you look online, it’s not hard to find people offering homemade hormone treatments called “homebrew HRT”.

“For a cis person to get the same hormones, you just go to your doctor and say my period's being too heavy. So they'll give you estrogen or progesterone. If a cis man was worried about their hair receding, they can get one of the tablets that is given to trans people to help with their transition. It's so nuts and frustrating because the other way people do it is the expensive one. You can go through a private doctor in Spain or somewhere. You can just walk into the doctor and say, ‘I'm trans’, and they just give you hormones, but again, this is pricey”

During my chat with Eleanor what really gets to me is how unsupported and unheard the trans community seems to be. I personally can’t fathom any other health service with an 18 year waiting list. It seems that if there’s that much of a demand for the system, then the system needs to be revised and funded more.

At just 29, Eleanor already has such a mature head on her shoulders. She also hasn’t escaped the rise in transphobic abuse. “There's two very different kinds of people who are transphobic. There's the people who are genuinely hateful and there are people who are scared because they don't know what's going on.” It’s this mature perspective and also her involvement and volunteer work in the community that has given Eleanor both a sense of peace and normality.

“I have friends who care about me. I have a social life, I have relationships. I do my stuff and I’m totally fine. It is just one aspect of my life. I focus a lot on it because I'm passionate about it and feel the need to help others. But at the end of the day, I could step away and just go working a normal job and not worry about any of it. It's just a part of who I am.