Butterfly The TV drama about gender dysphoria that every parent should see
A new ITV drama focuses on a child’s gender dysphoria. Writer Tony Marchant hopes it will change attitudes, he tells Julia Llewellyn Smith
It’s evening and Vicky (Anna Friel) and her husband Stephen (Emmett J Scanlan) are sitting watching television when their teenage daughter Lily enters with their 11-year-old son, Max (Callum Booth-ford). Max is wearing a school blazer and a school uniform skirt. “Max wants to go to school like this from now on,” Lily explains.
“He’s paid for this with his own money and he wants to be known as Maxine.” Stephen’s jaw drops. “Is this a joke?” he asks. “I don’t want to do it, Dad,” Max replies sadly. “But I feel like I have to.”
This is a scene from the first episode of Butterfly, the new three-part ITV drama about a family torn apart by their son’s gender dysphoria, or strong incongruence and related distress, between their biological and perceived genders. The debate around transgenderism has never been more topical or more polarised, with several celebrities recently coming out as trans, including retired Olympic gold-medal-winning US decathlete Caitlyn Jenner and British boxing promoter Kellie Maloney.
On television, Eastenders recently featured transgender actor Riley Carter Millington playing trans Kyle Slater; Coronation Street had a long-running trans character, Hayley Cropper, who was killed off in 2014; while Amazon’s Transparent, about a family’s reaction to their father’s sex change, has just been commissioned for a fifth series. But
Butterfly is the first UK television drama to tackle the issue. The fact that Butterfly’s protagonist is a child makes the programme even more controversial; last year, two parents who removed their six-year-old from school to home educate in protest at a classmate’s request to be recognised as transgender were slammed by many as “transphobic”. But others supported them, wondering if transgenderism is a true phenomenon or a fad. Many also question the wisdom of encouraging children to make decisions about changing gender that, if taken to surgical conclusion, will leave them infertile and with a lifelong need for hormone therapy.
These are all questions that the Bafta-winning screenwriter of
Butterfly, Tony Marchant, subtly addresses in his drama. But Marchant has a particularly strong track record in focusing on family issues, such as his examination of children with ADHD in Channel 4’s Kid in the Corner in 1999 or his look at adoption in
Bad Blood on ITV in the same year, and with Butterfly he was determined to focus less on politics and more on domestic dynamics.
When we meet at ITV’S headquarters, he explains to me that for research, he visited Mermaids, a charity for transgender youths and their families. “What really struck me about the mothers I met at Mermaids – and they were mainly mothers – was the unconditional love they had for their children, a love that could stretch relationships to breaking point,” he tells me. Their situation particularly resonated with Marchant, 59, as the father of a 30-year-old son with Asperger’s syndrome and learning difficulties.
“There wasn’t the understanding of Asperger’s 25 years ago that there is now – it was called trainspotter’s syndrome and we really had to fight with the education authorities to get my son the help he needed.
“But when a child has a disability, at least you get some sympathy. With gender dysphoria, you get attacked on all sides. The walls seem to close in on children like this, it feels shockingly oppressive, and I’m always amazed at how their certainty about what they are inures them to the pain and hostility they might encounter.”
Butterfly shows Vicky supporting Max/maxine, who’s bullied at school. But Stephen is decidedly uneasier, leading to the couple separating, a situation that, according to Susie Green, Mermaids’s CEO, is extremely common. “The issue divides families and splits them up,” she says, sitting beside Marchant.
Green’s son Jack, now 25-year-old Jackie and the youngest British person to have a sex change at 16, was four when he first told his mother: “God has made a mistake, I should have been a girl.” Jackie was seven when her parents divorced.
“We broke up over something entirely different, but Jackie’s situation had been a contentious issue between us and my ex wasn’t entirely on board with my allowing her to wear what she wanted at home, saying I was facilitating it,” says Green, a former IT worker from Leeds.
As in Butterfly, Green’s wider family were generally unhelpful, convinced that Jackie was simply going through a phase and insisting – with the exception of Jackie’s grandmother and her three younger, “very protective” brothers – on buying her “boys’” toys “when all she wanted was a Barbie Rapunzel”.
In the past five years the number of minors – one only three years old – being referred to gender reassignment clinics has quadrupled. This has provoked claims that parents and children, brainwashed by the “fashion” for diversity, are rushing to the conclusion that tomboyish girls or effeminate boys must be transgender.
“Genderreassignment surgery isn’t a trendy thing that kids are doing on a whim, nor is it – as people are saying – a form of contagion,” Green insists. “There is still a massive social stigma towards trans people, the atmosphere towards them is hostile. Surveys suggest that 1 per cent of people around the world are trans, but only 0.06 per cent of the population are presenting at clinics, usually because their parents say: ‘Not on my watch.’ So I would say we’re seeing an under-representation of the issue.”
Green herself has been the subject of intense criticism for remortgaging her home to pay for Jackie – then
12 – to go to the US, where she was prescribed reversible pubertyblocking hormones then unavailable in the UK to under-16s [as Butterfly shows, this has since changed].
Many deemed her irresponsible, but – as Vicky says in Butterfly – Green believed: “I want to have a daughter, not a dead son.”
“I have been called dangerous, a child abuser but Jackie was terrified of puberty, she had a huge issue about getting hair and losing her singing voice,” she says. “We were already on suicide watch with her because of the school bullying. If she had gone through a male puberty, I didn’t think I’d be able to keep her alive.”
She also believes this early intervention made Jackie’s transition far smoother. “If Jackie had gone through puberty, her jawline and browline would have changed, she’d have had an Adams apple, she would have been 6ft 4in [having been prescribed oestrogen, she stopped growing at 6ft]. Some trans women ‘pass’ very well, but a lot don’t and that immediately marks you out as different, and violence against trans people is endemic, that’s why their suicide rates are so high.” (Jackie took seven overdoses, and statistics show 48 per cent of trans people under 26 have attempted suicide.)
On her 16th birthday, Jackie underwent gender reassignment surgery in Thailand, another
hugely controversial move since NHS guidelines advise against such operations for minors and the Thai government has subsequently banned them for under-18s. Green, however, believes such age limits are arbitrary.
“There’s this constant pushback that you should be avoiding surgery as an outcome at all costs,” Green says. “But I believe 100 per cent that you’re born trans, so why wait to become who you are?”
Her belief is contradicted by various studies that show that around 80 per cent of children with gender dysphoria eventually come to accept the sex into which they were born, but Green rejects these statistics as “really old and flawed. We know kids like Jackie who stay consistently, insistently and persistently like this aren’t likely to grow out of it.”
Stephen in Butterfly insists his son
‘What struck me about the mothers I met of trans youths was their unconditional love for their children’
is “just gay”, an assertion supported by many academics. “People have accused me of being homophobic and of ‘trans-ing’ Jackie, when actually I must be the only parent waiting for puberty, saying: ‘Please be gay’,” Green sights.
“But Jackie wasn’t. Instead, she was slicing her legs up. Others said I did this because I wanted a girl. I’ve just allowed all my kids to be who they want to be.”
Marchant’s hope is that Butterfly will help change our understanding of transsexuals in the same way, 19 years ago, Channel 4’s Queer as Folk transformed attitudes towards the gay community.
“I’d love to think the same tolerance we now show gay people might one day apply to trans people, but it needs TV representation,” he says.
“It’s all about education and awareness.”
Butterfly begins on Sunday on ITV at
9pm