The Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) was the creation of the child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr Domenico Di Ceglie. Inspired by a single case he’d worked on in the early 1980s of a teenager “who was claiming that she was a boy but in a female body”, he felt children with “these rare and unusual experiences” needed a service of their own. The focus of Gids was never on changing a young person’s gender identity, but in supporting them and their families in whatever solution they settled on to best manage it.