At 18, Aisling O'Reilly Kane legally became male. Now, almost ten years later, she wants to return to her original legal sex - but says Ireland has left her with unanswered questions about her records, healthcare and future

Published: 23:18, 30 July 2026 | Updated: 23:18, 30 July 2026 Her passport records her as male, and her medical history includes a mastectomy and years of testosterone treatment. Now, Aisling O’Reilly Kane fears that, in an emergency, the information available to healthcare workers may not reflect her full story. ‘If I have a seizure on the road or at work and they bring me into an ambulance, the ambulance won’t know my sex,’ she says. ‘I feel like I’m in a complete legal no man’s land – and I’m completely on my own with it.’ Aisling, 28, is from Dublin and now lives in Wicklow. Ten years ago, she legally became male. In March, she attended the first Detrans Awareness Day in Washington DC alongside 70 others who had detransitioned – the first time she felt able to speak openly. She has been off testosterone for more than a year, yet many of the changes remain. Her voice is permanently deeper and, within hours of shaving, a visible five o’clock shadow returns. The legal change may be reversible, the physical changes are not always so simple to undo. In 2015, the day after her Leaving Certificate, Aisling was granted a Gender Recognition Certificate – obtained, she says, before she had attended a gender clinic. Under the Gender Recognition Act 2015, the certificate changed her legal sex from female to male ‘for all purposes’. Her passport and, she says, her birth certificate record her as male. Until she applies to revoke it, she says she has no official documentation identifying her as female. She says she later sought advice about obtaining a birth certificate reflecting her legal recognition, but stopped short while trying to understand what changing her legal sex meant for her wider records – and whether those records could ever be changed back. Aisling O'Reilly Kane has little clarity about what happens next for her What she has found since, she says, is a gap – no dedicated service or guidance for people who want to reverse transition, and no official able to explain what happens to their medical and legal records. Irish law allows people to revoke a Gender Recognition Certificate and return to their original legal sex. Aisling’s concern is not that the route does not exist, but that there is little clarity about what follows – particularly when it comes to records, healthcare and everyday life. To understand how she arrived here, she believes it is necessary to go back to the beginning. Her early childhood was spent in Sweden, before she moved to Ireland. A tomboy from the age of five or six, she gravitated towards other tomboys, hid gifted dolls in a cupboard and wanted to shave like her father. Aged 13, after a friend of her mother underwent a mastectomy, the idea of having her own breasts removed took hold. She says she was not searching for trans content, but instead found breast cancer clinics online and began binding her chest. Aisling, back row, attended a Detrans Awareness Day in Washington earlier this year She believes a childhood brain injury affected her development and wishes that history had been properly considered before she transitioned. Looking back, Aisling believes it was not conversations about gender identity but lessons about women’s historical struggles that shaped how she saw herself. She says stories of women being denied rights, controlled through marriage and excluded from opportunities became, in her young mind, a warning about the vulnerability she associated with being female. ‘I have to disguise myself as a male, and then I can live safe in society,’ she thought. By ten, she says she had a plan: change her name at 18, bind her chest and move to Australia. At 15, she came out as gay and found, through LGBTQ+ youth organisation Belong To, what felt like a legitimate route towards a decision she says she had been considering for years. In 2015, through a connection at her school, she socially transitioned and legally changed her name. The day after her final Leaving Certificate exam, she had a double mastectomy. Ten days later, she started on testosterone. By 21, she was on puberty blockers. Aisling says she has to navigate the practical consequences of a decision she made as a teenager Now, almost a decade later, she is navigating the practical consequences of a decision she says she made as a teenager. She says she emailed every sitting government minister about her situation; just three replied. When she asked the Minister for Health how the difference between her legal status and medical history might affect emergency treatment for her epilepsy, she says she was told it fell outside the Minister’s area of expertise and that she should contact the HSE. ‘It’s almost like they don’t know what to do with me,’ she says. The questions, she says, go beyond any one minister’s inbox. At the centre is a distinction she was taught between sex – biological characteristics – and gender, identity. As a teacher, Aisling completed Belong To’s training programme for those supporting LGBTQ+ young people, which, she says, presented this distinction between sex and gender. She says she encountered it twice: first as a teenager involved with the organisation, and later as a teacher completing the training. ‘If sex and gender are different, and that’s what we’re teaching,’ she says, ‘then why did getting a Gender Recognition Certificate change my legal sex?’ Her environment shaped how far she went, she believes. In her single-sex secondary school, she could cut her hair short and wear trousers without any comment. ‘I only ever wanted the double mastectomy originally,’ she says. It was moving to a mixed-sex school and standing next to boys years younger than her whose voices had already broken that pushed her further. ‘It was being in that mixed school environment that made me want testosterone as well,’ she says. For years, nothing shifted. By 2024, working as a special needs assistant in a girls’ secondary school, Aisling had begun to consider detransitioning – and quietly decided against it. ‘I didn’t feel it was right to expose my first-year students to gender ideology and my gender issues by me detransitioning,’ she says. What began to change her perspective was not an argument, but a moment in a school hall. Years earlier, she says, lessons about the treatment of women throughout history had contributed to a fear that she needed to escape being female. Now, hearing a teacher discuss those same issues made her confront how deeply those ideas had affected her. During a history lesson, a male teacher addressing her class apologised on behalf of men generally. ‘I’m sure Mr Kane would agree – very sorry about how men have treated women throughout the centuries,’ he said. One of the girls, unaware she was speaking to a colleague she believed to be a man, laughed and told them they should be. Aisling walked out of the room. ‘I was so enraged walking downstairs,’ she says. ‘Because he doesn’t realise that I was told that at that age – and that traumatised me so much that I felt I had to disguise myself as a male. The thing that triggered me to transition that is the same thing that is triggering me to detransition.’ Almost nobody in Aisling's life currently knows what she is going through Almost nobody in Aisling’s life currently knows what she is going through. ‘I’m out at work, they call me Aisling,’ she says. ‘I’m out to maybe friends, but my family don’t know that I’m detransitioning or thinking of detransitioning. It’s a lot of responsibility.’ She describes living between two realities – what she calls ‘the gender bubble’ and everyday life outside it. ‘If I go to a conference and it’s all about gender, everyone’s like, yeah, of course, you’re female,’ she says. ‘But day-to-day life, that is not the case. I shaved this morning, and within six hours I have a five o’clock shadow.’ Yet she insists appearance is not identity. ‘I don’t think me dressing in men’s clothes makes me less female,’ she says. ‘I know I’m female.’ She is careful not to place all the blame on the individuals she meets day to day. ‘I think the government and the education system are putting too much on society,’ she says – on the colleagues, strangers and officials left to navigate, unguided, a situation she believes the State itself has never resolved. When approached by this newspaper, the Department of Education and Youth said it does not comment on individual cases. A spokesperson said schools are required to provide ‘safe, inclusive and supportive learning environments’ for all students and should respond to gender-related distress in a respectful, sensitive and student-centred way, working with parents and relevant professionals where appropriate. However, the Department confirmed it does not provide specific guidance relating to detransitioning, saying schools are expected to respond to individual circumstances based on the student’s current needs. The Department of Social Protections outlined that the Gender Recognition Certificate application system does not require applicants to have undergone any medical processes to change their gender, they just complete a statutory declaration that they have an intention to live in the preferred gender for the rest of their life. Once a person has been granted a Gender Recognition Certificate, their preferred gender is recognised by the State and updated on the record associated with their Personal Public Service number. ‘It should be noted that any issues of care and support around transitioning are in the domain of Department of Health/HSE,’ a spokesman said. Aisling’s case appears unusual but the system she entered has expanded dramatically – raising questions about whether the supports around it have kept pace. According to figures from the National Gender Service, just five people were referred to gender services in 2005. By 2024, that figure had risen into the hundreds. The service’s waiting list now runs to more than 2,500 people, and it has stopped accepting new referrals. The profile of those being referred has changed too. In several countries, teenage girls and young women have become the fastest-growing referral group, though Ireland does not publish comparable demographic data of its own. Clinicians internationally continue to debate how to distinguish enduring gender dysphoria from wider adolescent distress – a question examined in the UK’s Cass Review, though Ireland has not published equivalent long-term outcome data of its own. The legal side has grown just as fast. In 2024, 336 people aged over 18 applied for Gender Recognition Certificates, and 334 were granted – 192 male-to-female, 142 female-to-male, most aged 18 to 30. Neither the National Gender Service nor the Department of Social Protection publishes figures showing how many people revoke Gender Recognition Certificates, stop hormone treatment or seek support after detransitioning. Ireland tracks those entering the system closely but it appears to keep no record of those trying to find their way back out. Aisling’s experience appears uncommon. Available evidence suggests most people who transition do not later seek to reverse that decision, though estimates vary and Ireland has published no long-term outcome data. Stephen McMahon, of the Irish Patients’ Association, says the principle at stake extends well beyond gender services. ‘Patients have an ongoing right to make decisions about their care, including the right to change course,’ he says. ‘A later change of mind does not, by itself, establish that the original decision was wrong; equally, having consented before does not permit a system to disregard a patient’s present wishes or leave them without appropriate care.’ The Mail sought responses from the HSE, the National Gender Service and the Department of Health on what happens when someone applies to revoke a Gender Recognition Certificate, and what responsibility, if any, the State carries in supporting a person after formally recognising their transition. They had not responded by the time of publication. Asked, looking back, who she believes bears responsibility for what happened to her, Aisling doesn’t reach for anger. ‘I think my delayed development should have been taken into account – all my medical history should have been taken into account,’ she says. But she returns, as she does again and again across hours of conversation, to one plain conclusion: ‘It’s just clear to me that legally, this is not working.’ Ireland has created a legal route for people to change their gender. Aisling’s question is whether it has created a route for those who later need to change it back. Until someone answers that, people like her say they will keep discovering the gap the hard way – one form, one appointment, one unanswered email at a time. Sorry we are not currently accepting comments on this article.