My child wouldn’t be here today if she hadn’t gone from Jack to Jackie
She’s one of the mums whose stories inspired ITV’s transgender drama – which critics say is just crude propaganda. But here Susie defiantly insists . . .
NO PAIn surpasses that of a mother watching her child’s despair. Susie Green spent three years ‘on suicide watch’, in constant fear that the next overdose her adolescent daughter took would be fatal.
‘She was 12 when I came home to find her curled up in a ball on her bed crying,’ says Susie. ‘She’d been taunted and spat at, called “freak” and “tranny” at school, and some boys had shouted at her: “Have you had it chopped off yet?” It was a campaign of terror and the school was beyond ineffective.
‘At home, I’d locked all the tablets and knives in a safe but she’d stolen paracetamol from a supermarket and stashed packets of it all round her bedroom. She’d taken 16.
‘It was the third of seven attempts in the space of three years to take her life and she was sobbing: “I just want to die and come back as a proper boy or a proper girl and not this
thing.” It was heartbreaking. ‘I said to her, “If you do this again you could be dead” — and all I could see in her eyes was acceptance that this was the case. She was in so much distress that I could not reach her.’ Susie’s daughter Jackie, now 25, was born Jack, a beautiful 8lb baby boy. She was four when she told her mum: ‘God made a mistake — I should have been a girl.’
Her story is harrowing. What’s more, it’s among several that are the inspiration behind a ground-breaking three-part serial on ITV that started yesterday. Starring Anna Friel and emmett J. Scanlan, Butterfly relates the anguish of transgender adolescent Max (Callum Booth-Ford) who, as Jackie did, identifies as a girl from early childhood.
The storyline is bound to fuel debate on this still thorny subject of transgender issues, as record numbers of youngsters seek help for suspected gender dysphoria in the UK, some as young as four.
Indeed, a spokesperson for Transgender Trend, a group alarmed by the growing number of children changing gender, claims Butterfly’s producers failed to seek their expertise and have created a ‘one-sided narrative’, inflating the suicide risk of transgender children.
Susie counters: ‘The programme does not address suicide, although it does look at selfharm, and it is by no means an advert for medical intervention.
‘Jackie needed it — I don’t believe she would be alive today without it — but this is not going to be the case for everyone. The decision is one every young person and their family has to make individually.’
The series, for which Susie was a consultant, is disturbingly authentic, she says. Like Anna Friel’s character, Susie admits she was initially terrified when Jack first opened up to her, but, she says, it explained so many things.
‘It explained why Jack’s favourite outfits were a pink tutu and a Snow White costume. Why he asked for Barbies, Polly Pockets and My Little Pony for Christmas, and why, when his Dad bought him Thomas the Tank engine, toy cars and garages, he discarded them.
‘I jumped from fear to denial and told Jack it was fine to be a boy who liked girly things but that did not make him a girl. He was my first child and I just thought I had a very effeminate little boy who was gay. ‘This was 20 years ago — I knew nothing about transgender people then. For the next few years, although I tried to convince Jack that liking girls’ things did not make him a girl, he’d insist: “But Mummy, I am a girl.”
‘It caused massive rows with my then husband, who believed he needed to make Jack toughen up and be masculine. I remember how angry he was.’
Jackie was seven years old when Susie took her to the Tavistock Gender Identity Clinic in London, where, within a year, she was diagnosed with gender dysphoria (a condition where a person experiences distress because of the mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity).
The clinic advised that while she should continue in her male persona publicly, inside the home she should wear whatever clothes she chose.
‘I remember our first visit to the girls’ section of a clothes shop,’ recalls Susie. ‘I said, “Choose anything you like” and she was so happy. She pelted off and came back beaming, holding two dresses.
‘“Do you like this one or that one?” she said. I was conscious that people could be looking and judging, but then I saw the look on Jackie’s face and I didn’t care. Her happiness was the most important thing of all.’
THen, after being treated in the U.S. with hormone blockers to delay the onset of male puberty when she was 12 — the treatment was not then available for children her age in the UK — Jackie underwent gender reassignment surgery in Thailand on her 16th birthday.
‘Dr Suporn Watanyusakul, the surgeon, was regarded as the best in the world in his field,’ says Susie. And Jackie made history as the youngest person in the world ever to undergo the procedure.
Susie, who was working as an IT manager and was by then a divorced mum of four, re-mortgaged their home in Leeds to raise the £13,500 to pay for Jackie’s lower body surgery.
Over the preceding four years she had also spent around £20,000 on hormone treatment, blood tests, psychological assessments, therapy and travel to the U.S., where paediatric endocrinologist Dr norman Spack treated Jackie at his clinic for transgender children.
‘A lot of well-meaning friends told me I should be trying to change Jackie’s behaviour. When they saw her out in girls’ clothes, they worried about bullying.
‘I knew other parents were talking about me and judging me, just as Max’s mum is censured in the film. His grandmother accuses his mum of “indulging his every whim”.
‘But I believe Jackie wouldn’t be alive today if she hadn’t had the surgery. It was a necessity. And by the time she went to Thailand, her dad was on board and came with us.
‘When she came round from the surgery, she was ecstatic. She said she felt fixed. She had lost what she felt was a birth defect. The difference it has made is phenomenal in terms of her confidence and self-worth.’
Today, Jackie — a tall and strikingly attractive young woman — has achieved success as a singer, actress and model. In 2012, aged 18, she was the first transgender contestant to be runner up in the Miss england beauty pageant. She now works in the hospitality industry, where she also met her boyfriend, in Italy and the South of France.
In 2015, Susie gave up her IT job to work full-time for Mermaids, a charity supporting gender diverse and transgender children and young people, and is now its CeO.
Much of the ITV series resonated with her: ‘The bits where the dad blames the mum and she irrationally blames herself. I did that myself. Was there something I’d done wrong in pregnancy? Did I not produce enough testosterone? Did I wish for a girl?
‘It is honest in its portrayal of the friction between the parents. It’s believable and truthful and it challenges the patronising myth that kids would go through terrible suffering that could be avoided if they only tried harder to be happy in the gender they were born with.
‘Parents of children with gender dysphoria are not indulging their “whims” when they seek help.’
Mum to Connor, 21, and twins Will and George, 19, as well as Jackie, Susie recalls how her daughter — then Jack — was made miserable by her difference at primary school, neither fitting in with the girls nor wanting to play football with the boys.
‘When she was just six, she ran away from school,’ Susie remembers. ‘She asked me: “When can I have an operation to make me into a girl?” An older cousin had told her there were such procedures. She was lonely and isolated. She felt there was something wrong with her.
‘The kids at school realised she was different and it was bandied about that she wanted a sex change. Jackie told one of the teachers: “I have a girl’s brain in a boy’s body.” The teacher asked me: “Can’t you make Jack stop saying this?” and I replied: “Can you tell me how?”’
Her three brothers, however, never
regarded her as anything other than a much-loved sister.
‘Because the boys are very much younger than Jackie, they really only ever saw her as a girl. If she was ever bullied, they’d always stick up for her and defend her.’
When Jackie turned eight, her parents separated. Susie says that their then divergent views about their eldest child’s gender identity were not the cause, although they did provoke arguments.
Susie decided to move from Croydon to her native Yorkshire, where her mother was on hand to help her with her four children.
Meanwhile, Susie noted that whenever Jackie was able to live as a girl, she was ‘lighter, happier and more cheerful ’ — ‘so I began to feel that forcing her to be a boy at school was the wrong thing to do.
‘She felt it was something shameful and secret when she wore girls’ clothes, so in her last year at primary school she grew her hair and began dressing as a girl.’
When Jackie went to secondary school, though, the abuse began to ratchet up. ‘A parent, a woman, repeatedly shouted from her car, calling Jackie “weirdo, tranny, freak”. The police intervened and it stopped. A boy spat in her face. She was knocked over, kicked, punched and a group of boys chased her and tried to pull up her skirt to see what was underneath.
‘There was one teacher who would very deliberately call her “he” and “Jack” when she was wearing the girls’ uniform and had long hair. He did it to upset her and the kids laughed.
‘It was a campaign of terror. She was constantly harassed.’
By now her ex-husband had united with Susie in supporting Jackie. ‘The turning point came when he and I were chatting to a delightful, confident teenage girl at a Mermaids meeting, and it was only when he realised she was transgender that he began to see Jackie in a positive light, too.’
But now, Jackie was enduring a new and quite different form of physical assault — from unwelcome changes in her own body.
‘To add to the anxiety and depression caused by the bullying, she was starting to go through a male puberty. It was horrific for her,’ says Susie. ‘She began selfharming — cutting herself.’
At that time (although protocols have changed now) the NHS would not supply any medication to pause puberty, no matter how bad a child’s reaction to it — ‘and Jackie was telling me she’d rather be dead than see her body changing into a man’s. She was suicidal. The Tavistock Clinic had told me puberty would probably resolve her feelings of being female, but it didn’t. The reverse happened.
‘So this is when I found Dr Spack in America, who was prepared to prescribe totally reversible hormone-blocking medication for her, just to pause the onset of puberty. But although it transformed her life, she was still enduring terrible hostility at school.’
AT Her wits’ end, Susie consulted an educational welfare officer and, aged 14, Jackie left school and continued her education three days a week at a special unit for children with long-term health issues.
Meanwhile, Dr Spack prescribed oestrogen, which promoted breast development and helped to stop Jackie growing too tall. (Today she is a little over 6ft.)
‘Her school life in the specialist unit was much less turbulent,’ recalls Susie ‘but she still hated her body.’
So, in a move that many would find extreme, just before Jackie turned 16, Susie consulted plastic surgeon Dr Suporn in Thailand. ‘I asked him when my daughter would be able to have gender reassignment surgery. I expected him to say 18, but to my delight he said she could have it at 16.’
So, supported by psychological reports and a referral letter from Dr Spack, Jackie was admitted for surgery that transformed her life.
‘It went ahead on her 16th birthday and the care and support she was given was top-notch.’
Jackie herself reflects on the torment of her past. ‘High school was a nightmare,’ she says. ‘Some kid I’d never even met before came into the classroom and said: “Is that freak in here?” I was spat on and beaten up. It’s really hard to recall how cruel people could be.’
Today, she regards her transgender identity as incidental to her female persona. ‘I consider myself a sister, daughter, singer, actress and model before I am a transperson,’ she says. ‘Why do I have to have a label? I’m a girl. I always have been.’
According to the Stonewall 2017 school report, the largest UK study of its kind, 64 per cent of transgender children are bullied at school, 84 per cent self-harm and 45 per cent attempt suicide.
Other sources claim these figures are inflated. The Gender Identity Development Service, a specialist NHS clinic, contends that of 5,000 young patients referred to them from January 2016 to August 2018, just three suicides were recorded.
Susie contends that these figures are skewed because young people are afraid to register suicide attempts for fear that their treatment will be affected.
Her prevailing message, however, is a positive one. ‘If this TV drama achieves a positive outcome for just one transgender young person and their family, it will have been worth it,’ Susie says.
For help and support on transgender issues, or to donate to Mermaids go to http:// mermaidsuk.org.uk
Butterfly, a three-part drama, is on ITV on Sundays at 9pm.