Butterfly, episode one review: 'An incredibly affecting drama'

Anna Friel shines as the mother of a transgender child

Anna Friel as Vicky and Callum Booth-Ford as Max, who becomes Maxine, in ‘Butterfly’ (ITV)

There’s a moment during Butterfly that brings a tear to my eye. A couple of thuggish kids are trying to bully the transgender central character, 11-year old Maxine – who was assigned male at birth but has come to identify as a girl. Luckily, her big sister, Lily, comes to her aid. When they challenge Lily about whether she was protecting Maxine because she was her “brother”, she answers no. As they clear off, she explains to the shy and sensitive Maxine that she wasn’t doing that because she wished to disown her, but rather because “I think of you as my sister”.

It’s incredibly affecting, as is much else in this excellent drama, the first in what is certainly a landmark ITV series – featuring, as it does, some very real and very difficult issues around gender dysphoria.

There are scenes with specialists, and an appointment duly made with the local Gender Identity Management Service. Through some naturalistic dialogue, we are gently guided towards the realisation – a complicated truth for some, an ugly one for others – that gender and sexuality are not the same, and some people know this about themselves from an early age.

But not everyone does. Maxine’s granddad, doing his best to be with it, even tries to persuade Maxine – who would prefer to go by the name Maxine, use the girls’ loos and wear a skirt – that she is “just gay”, and thus falls into a now more socially acceptable category with which the family, and everyone else, can cope. Which is progress of sorts, I suppose, but still leaves Maxine exactly where she has been ever since she started wearing skirts, pink stringy tops and jewellery; battling a wall of transphobia.

Battling, and losing. Her mum, the 40-ish Vicky, played with a nice tenacity by Anna Friel, is the most sympathetic of Maxine’s family, but even she weeps when she asks a doctor whether Maxine is the way she is because of some disastrous mistake she made in her pregnancy. She manages Maxine’s life by allowing her to dress and behave as a girl at home – but not outside, and certainly not in school.

Maxine’s dad, Stephen, (Emmet J Scanlan) is the more conservative. He loves his lad, as he sees her, and doesn’t want to lose his little boy. Maxine, for her part, deeply loves her dad, and even pretends to enjoy playing football just to please him. Mum, dad and everyone else in the family but Lily, hopes she will “grow out of it”. Maxine knows she will not.

Via a flashback, we learn the reason Stephen and Vicky split up – because, out of fear and frustration, he slapped Maxine when she would not stop dancing to Kylie’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”. Wearing a pink mohair jumper. When he eventually moves back – for fear that Maxine’s self-harming will eventually lead to a successful suicide, and to try and “change his mind” – Maxine very shrewdly asks if she was actually the reason Stephen left, rather than Vicky. Stephen admits she was. More tears, from Maxine and me.

Fine as all the performances are, including a turn by Alison Steadman as a granny who disapproves of “Maxine’s funny ways”, the most compelling presence throughout is Maxine, played by Callum Booth-Ford. The blend of androgyny and steel, confusion and guile, self-loathing and pride – it could have been a gigantic sickly mess of emotional self-indulgence for all concerned. It isn’t. It even takes pains to point out, through a YouTube video Maxine secretly watches, that trans people are not one homogenous “community” with identical problems and identical answers.

Butterfly is a fine drama, with an uncomplicated script by Tony Marchant that allows the emotions to flow. I really want to see Maxine find some happiness.