So can we just start by having you introduce yourself, what your title is, and how you were selected to do this review?

Yes, so my name's Hilary Cass. I'm chair of the independent review into services for gender questioning young people.

And I was selected because I have previously been a president of the Royal College of

Pediatrics and Child Health.

And so that gives me a fairly high profile role in policy. And having just started my retirement, the phone went,

and NHS England asked if I might be interested in taking on this role.

What a peaceful, calm way to start your retirement. Yes, the plans to learn how to play the saxophone and how to play bridge kind of went to the wall.

Well, so this kind of connected to my next question.

I was just wondering, you know, when you were first asked to conduct this review, I mean, did you have any idea of what you were walking into

and how contentious this space is? So I obviously had some idea of how contentious it was.

It's become more toxic in the time since I took it on. In the first instance, when Dr Hilary Cass got a call from England's National Health Service in 2019,

the country's only youth gender clinic was in crisis.

The clinic was part of the Tavistock Center in London.

It was called the Gender Identity Development Service, or JIDS.

And over the past decade, as the demand surged and the patient population changed, a rift

had formed among the staff. Some of the providers voiced concerns about the clinic's

years-long wait list and the pressure they felt to quickly

approve kids for blockers and hormones. They felt there wasn't enough time to help kids work

through their issues. But they said their concerns were dismissed by other providers and by

higher-ups at Jids. Some of them said they were labeled as transphobic for speaking up.

Eventually, 10 of these providers went to a senior figure outside the clinic,

who interviewed them about their experiences

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