Hilary Cass

"If a family can walk out of the hospital having lost their child and say that they couldn't have been better supported, then I can go home and feel OK."

"It is really difficult to spot a sick child."

"Children are well one minute and very sick the next. So you have much less time than you have with adults."

"Half the kids in A&E outpatients need not be in hospital and, if you come to hospital, you are more likely to be admitted."

"Someone will bring in a baby because the baby has green poo, but grandma could have been able to say 'that's normal'."

"I have been disappointed by the lack of evidence on the long-term impact of taking hormones from an early age; research has let us all down, most importantly you. The reality is we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress."

"We've got it locked into this focus on medical interventions. And certainly some of the young adults said to us, they wish they'd known when they were younger, that there were more ways of being trans than just a binary medical transition."

"Because of the toxicity of the debate, [children have] often been bypassed by local services who've been really nervous about seeing them. So rather than doing the things that they would do for other young people with depression or anxiety, or perhaps undiagnosed autistic spectrum disorder, they’ve tended to pass them straight on to the Gids service."