Earlier this year, Georgie Stone made headlines for her plight to change the fact that Australia is the only place in the world where young transgender people must go to court to get hormones.

She shared her own experience of going through the legal process and spoke out about teens buying medication on the black market because court takes too long and costs too much.

The help of a solicitor alone can be more than $20,000, and there's financing treatment on top of that.

Georgie says she was lucky to be supported by pro bono lawyers.

Since she featured ABC's Australian Story in August 2016, a legal centre in Sydney has seen a huge increase in trans teens and their parents seeking legal support.

The Inner City Legal Centre (ICLC) helps families lodge Special Medical Procedure applications to the Family Court free of charge.

"Our numbers of files have exploded in the past six months", Director Vicki Harding told Hack.

The small centre of four solicitors now represents 20 families of trans teens, up from five families about two years ago.

Ms Harding says they're struggling to keep up with the jump in demand, which comes as the centre faces planned funding cuts in July 2017.

Up to a third of the centre's commonwealth funding is expected to be axed, which could mean they'll be forced to scale back their LGBTIQ support services.

"[The cuts] will have a huge impact if we can't fundraise to make the difference. If we can't make that, we will have to cut back on services because we may lose either days or an entire solicitor position," Ms Harding said.

ICLC is now fundraising to make up for the shortfall, with an ultimate goal of $100,000 by mid-2017.

"The service is extremely important to [the families]...in some cases they wouldn't have been able to afford representation at all."

'It literally can be all the difference'

Sammi Dunworth is an 18-year-old "photographer and filmmaker and female" from Sydney's northern beaches.

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"I was born a biological male but later on in life thankfully discovered I was a transgender female," she told Hack.

Ms Dunworth began the transitioning process when she was 17 and says ICLC helped her family successfully navigate the Family Court system.

"Having someone by your side supporting you through the court system literally can be all the difference [between transitioning or not]" she said.

She says it's 'almost vital' for trans kids and their families.

"To lose legal services, it's almost like losing the core of how youth transition, without them it does limit who can transition," she said.

"There aren't many transgender legal support centres in Australia, but there is a growing number of people coming to terms with their gender identity."

But why the cuts?

When Vicki Harding took the job about 18 months ago, she was aware she'd have to look at fundraising or face losing staff, and the cuts have been a long time coming.

Legal Aid is in the process of finalising a legal needs analysis it has conducted across New South Wales to work out where community legal centres are most needed.

Basically, commonwealth funding for every community legal centre is going back into a pool and the money will be redistributed according to that needs analysis.

But centres like ICLC are in areas that have become mostly middle-class.

Ms Harding says that makes it hard to prove their demand for legal assistance is as high as lower socioeconomic areas, especially in terms of for LGBTIQ support.

"It means that the older centres like Redfern and Inner City Legal Centre are being hit disproportionately with these cuts," she said.

The Centre is also advocating for the law surrounding transitioning to be reformed.

In 2013, the rules were altered to allow transgender children to access puberty blockers without needing to go to court, thanks to Georgie's appeal.

But they still need to apply to court for irreversible gender-affirming hormones.

ICLC wants any requirement for families to apply for Family Court to access the 'stage two' treatment abolished.

The Federal Government has indicated it would be open to changing the law in that respect, but there's been no updates yet.