For as long back as he can remember, Dylan would go to bed at night and pray that he would wake up a boy. “I had no idea. I would have classified him as a tomboy,” his mother, Kirsty Donohue, says of the child who, until he turned 13, she thought of as her daughter.

Unlike other parents of trans children, some of whom say they “always knew”, Donohue was “totally blindsided” when she discovered Dylan was transgender. “At that stage, he had started to self-harm. He discovered there was a word for how he felt. He came across the word ‘transgender’, and he thought: ‘That’s me.’”

At that point, Donohue says, “I didn’t even know what the ‘T’ in LGBT stood for. I’d never looked it up. It didn’t apply to me.”

Her first reaction was to say: ‘You’re spending too much time on the internet. You don’t need to put yourself in a box. You just need to talk to somebody. Come back to us when you’re 18.’

“All,” she says now, “the wrong things to say.”

Within a couple of days, she realised that what Dylan needed was “our acceptance and love and support”. For others, recent media coverage – including last week’s RTÉ Prime Time debate – might have offered their first insight into the issues facing trans and non-binary people in Ireland.

As the programme reported, Ireland is experiencing an increase in the number of adults and children accessing gender identity services. No overall figures for the number of transgender or non-binary people in Ireland are available, beyond those accessing services.

In 2007, just 10 people accessed gender identity services for adults; by 2017, the number was 210.Read more via Irish Times