Lily Maynard

Episode 2 of ‘Butterfly’ hit our screens last night, and what a whirlwind it was. As the opening credits rolled the self-described  ‘truthful and powerfully beautiful drama’ opened with a scan of Max’s dressing table: moving past the snarling dinousaurs to the place where wide-eyed, pastel-maned ponies mingled with lipsticks and glitter lamps, just in case we had forgotten that all is not ‘normal’ in the Duffy household.

Dropping all pretense of being much more than a glorified advert for Mermaids, the first scene showed Vicky & Stephen, Max’s parents, attending a Mermaids meeting where the host tells them how her now-daughter currently lives in Italy and is ‘dating a gorgeous Italian’. Well, that’s certainly a step in the right direction: what more could a ‘real’ girl want? A career perhaps? Validation outside of her relationships with men? Of course not. This is a world where stereotypes are not just revered but aspired to.

“Listen to your child,” she tells Vicky and Stephen in a condescending whisper. Vicky finds the meeting ‘really encouraging;’ Stephen finds it ‘difficult‘.
I’m already reaching for a large gin and tonic.

On discovering Max is still being bullied at school, Stephen approaches the bullies in the school yard, and tells them “You say anything to him again and I’ll put my hands so far down your throat I will rip out your heart.”

 

Totally inappropriate and just a tad over the top, but fairly understandable under the weight of all that testosterone. This is a bloke who even hoovers the carpets in a manly manner. You can bet it will backfire on him in Episode 3. Nonetheless, personally I applaud his ability to shut the bullying little blighters up: my hubby is horrified.

“We’re as good as any other parents,” says Stephen, defensively, when Vicky’s mum accuses the family of ‘paper(ing) over the cracks’.

“Are you?” throws back wide-eyed Lily, who in time-honoured teenage tradition seems to think good parenting can be measured by immediate capitulation to every whim, “You’re still not giving him what he wants.” Preferred pronouns are forgotten in the heat of the moment.

Later? The next day? The scenes change so fast it’s sometimes hard to tell, as the script-writer rushes on to the next event. Stephen- or Nigella as Vicky oh-so-amusingly calls him on this occasion- is in the kitchen again. “Where’s Max?” she asks innocently, and we know trouble is on the cards.

Max’s whereabouts forgotten for a minute, Vicky & Stephen almost kiss, but Lily bursts in: she needs a wee and Max has been in the bathroom for half an hour. Alarm bells ring, everyone dashes upstairs and Stephen breaks down the door with a manly kick. Max is in the bath with a piece of broken glass, threatening to cut off his penis. Stephen takes the glass off him and accidentally cuts himself: camera zooms in on the blood.

Vicky wraps Max in a towel, crying, “They said this would happen, didn’t they? We’ve got to do something!”

“We will, son, we will.”

“We will MAXINE!” glares Max from his mother’s arms, and I half expect Ave Satani to start playing in the background.

Commercial break.

Camera pans over pink-lit dresser adorned with pompoms, nail polish, hairbrush & mirrors. Max is sleeping, clutching the Mermaid pendant which dad untangles from his hands & places on a different dresser, one sporting a dinosaur, a toy car and a games console.  The camera pans slowly into a close-up on the pendant as the sun rises, the room brightens, birds sing and daylight floods the room.

Cut to Vicky, packing a suitcase full of all the ‘boy things’ in Max’s  bedroom and shoving it under the bed. The family don’t seem to be able to make their minds up. Either he can’t have any ‘girl’ things or he can’t have any ‘boy’ things. No wonder he’s confused. The last thing she picks up is a tiny pair of blue baby shoes from the shelf. These too must go – what self-respecting girl would ever have owned a pair of blue shoes? The suitcase packed away, Vicky collapses hyperventilating by the bed.

They visit the head teacher who is worried Max may be just going through a phase and talks about pencil cases and netball.

“I want a happy daughter, not a dead son,” says Vicky.
“It’s what I want to be. It’s what I am.” says Max.
“I’ve seen him.. her..  in her school skirt, the tights and that, and, yeah, it looks right.” forces out Stephen.

Poor bloke, he’s trying so hard and he just ends up sounding kinda creepy. When he runs back to relative sanity in the arms of ex-girlfriend Gemma, part of me doesn’t even blame him for being a love rat.

Rather than this raising safeguarding alarm bells- it’s quite definitely the weirdest thing Stephen has said so far- this seems to convince the headteacher, who promises to send a letter to Max’s year group over half term, saying he’ll be coming back as Maxine.

The camera cuts to Max, who is getting dressed  in a training bra, tights, pink knickers and frills.  His hair is curled and he is painted up with pink lipstick, blusher and eyeshadow by his mother and sister. His eyebrows are now perfectly plucked and sculpted: adorned with the trappings of femininity he looks not entirely unlike a short-haired Brooke Shields in ‘Pretty Baby’.


“Wow,” says Stephen.
“Will she do?” asks Vicky.

By this point I’m looking round the room for a suitable receptacle should I feel the need to throw up.

“She will,” declares dad, and with the blessings of the patriarchy upon him, Max is reinvented as Maxine, and off to school he goes.

“Will I be a proper girl?” he asks, unconvinced, arriving at school.
“Just be yourself,” advises Lily, oblivious to the irony that being himself is the one thing that Max is not allowed to do.

Not at any point in this entire soap opera has anyone suggested to Max that he can like the things he does and still be a boy.

School starts. The girls love him- one gives him a rose for ‘grace, happiness and gentleness‘  and they send him messages on social media saying ‘you look great’ and ‘you are so brave’. The boys are less kind. One is quite rightly sent from the room for calling Max and his new friend ‘a tranny and a stick insect’.

The teacher is concerned about Max and starts “Maxine…”

“You said “let’s just get on,’” Max cuts her off, firmly.

Maxine is calling the shots now, although in most schools a girl wearing that much make up would be told to ‘go wipe that muck off your face.’

Max makes a new friend: the girl who gave him the rose is an anorexic who shows him her self-harming scars. The storyline takes care to emphasise that there is a big difference between the two children. She is ill, Max is not.

“Are you ill?” asks Max.

“Yes. You?”


“No.”
“

You’re lucky.”


They put on some pop music and dance and sing along. Much wiggling ensues. Because they are girls, obvs.

The family meet up with grandma, who is angry to see Max sporting a pink hoodie & shoes and, astonishingly, even more pink make up than in previous scenes. Lily and Max dance on the platform while Vicky and her mum talk. Grandma accuses Vicky of spoiling Max and cruelly spits out, “You’re no grandson of mine,” allowing Max the snappy comeback, “I know I’m not.”



The family gets an appointment at the gender clinic after five months wait. Wearing pink shoes and a short skirt, Max arrives at the Ferrybank with his parents, but all does not go as Vicky hopes.

Stephen expresses his reservations, and Max tells a clinician, “Mum says there’s something I can take,” adding, “It was Lily’s idea. She made me do it,” and later, “I don’t want them to stop loving me.”

The clinic ‘don’t think it’s helpful to focus all our attention on physical intervention’ and refuse to prescribe puberty blockers despite Vicky’s insistence, instead advising ‘watchful waiting’ and suggesting Max finds ‘more fluid ways to embrace your gender’.

Vicky freaks out.“She can’t wait! Wait until she’s been through all that agony and hell and she ends up in a man’s body? Offer more counselling when she tries to commit suicide again?”

She turns to Stephen, “It’s your fault!”

Max sits next to his mother, bubblegum-pink lips unmoving; beshadowed eyes unblinking, throughout this ghoulish prophecy.

“They’re not gonna hand them out like bloody sweets!” shouts Stephen, who has done his research & knows that most kids desist post puberty if they aren’t given blockers. “These are the experts!”

“I’m the expert!” shouts Vicky, who doesn’t even seem to have done a quick Google on the potential problems involved with prescribing blockers to pre-pubescent kids.

Transgender Trend yesterday published a comprehensive article in response to this episode, entitled ‘They Look Normal’, exploring the origin and effect of ‘blockers’ in depth and discrediting the ‘harmless and reversible’ myth. It’s such an excellent piece that I don’t need to go further into the implications here. Instead, I encourage you to read the article (link above) for yourself.

If Max’s mother gets hold of blockers for him he may well ‘pass’ as a girl, but if he goes on to take cross-sex hormones he will almost certainly end up sterile and with little or no libido. Is this less important than how he may look?

The family goes home.

“I don’t think I can trust you any more,” Vicky tells Stephen.

Max goes to bed without taking his make-up off.

 

The next day Vicky goes back to Mermaids where she is told her GP is unlikely to prescribe puberty blocking drugs and advised not to buy them online, but that there are ‘other options’. A trip to a doctor in Boston would do the job, she is told, but would cost thousands of pounds. Vicky says she’s starting a business but is told ominously, “Vicky, you need the money now.”

Taking a cheque her mother had given her to bolster her new business, Vicky decides to head for America without telling Stephen or Lily. She dashes home and grabs Max, ignoring Lily who is desperate to talk to her.

Hastily removing his earrings and make up, Max and Vicky rush to the airport, as back home Lily is beckoned into the dark-doored, gloomy-looking house of a boy from school.

Cut to Vicky and Max stepping out of a taxi, outside a state-of-the-art glass-fronted hospital. The sky is blue and everything is clinically clean.

Their luggage has disappeared but Max’s make-up is back. Vicky takes his hand and smiles.

Credits roll.

Butterfly is a 3 part drama shown in the UK on ITV. All stills in this blogpost are screenshots from episode 2.

I watched the first episode of the new ITV drama ‘Butterfly’ with interest and growing discomfort.

From the opening credits, where Max removes his lipstick and pink nail polish, to the firm handshakes dolled out by his bearded father, I was especially struck by the programme’s blithe promotion and acceptance of gendered stereotypes.

As Max removes the trappings of femininity, the hair adornments, the nail polish, lipstick and jewellery, the camera pans back and we see his face. This powerful opening speaks volumes: remove the adornments we associate with girlhood and this boy-child is just that: a boy.  How could he be anything else?

We learn that Max’s parents are recently separated, and that Max’s penchant for feminine things has played a large part in this split. It’s made clear that Max feels guilty about the split and desperately wants his parents back together.

In a bid to impress his dad on weekend visits, Max tries to enjoy playing football. We learn that he has also cut his hair in an attempt to please his father.  And this pretence works, up to a point.  But the moment the mask of machismo slips, dad is having none of it. When Max spins and dances in a pink top at home, it become too much for his father, who tries to stop him, first saying,” I’m warning you, Max,” and then striking him.

Dad has made rules in the past about what Max can and can’t do. “There’ll be more rules about it now,” he warns, darkly.

“In our house you get to do ‘girl things’ but nowhere else.”

Even his supportive mum can’t see beyond conforming to conventional sexist stereotypes of how boys and girls should behave, telling Max,

“Outside you’re a boy, you do what boys do.”

 

Which brings us to the elephant in the ‘Butterfly’ house. At no point does anyone tell Max that he’s just fine as he is, that liking traditionally ‘feminine’ things doesn’t make him any less of a boy.  That it’s ok for a boy not to enjoy ‘manly’ pastimes. His grandmother dismisses his feelings as a ‘silly phase’. Grandad, at one point,  suggests the family should “all just say you’re gay and it’s no problem at all,” but we all know grandad is old and foolish and the idea that Max might not be the problem is not even considered by any other character.  No wonder he thinks he must be a girl. In Max’s world, it isn’t possible to enjoy the things he does and still be male. The message Max receives from everyone around him is that he is not a ‘proper’ boy.

There follows a suicide attempt, brought on by Max’s mother’s attempt to go out on a date. Rushed through the hospital, Max lies like a modern day Ophelia, hair lightly curled, impeccable and perfectly made up, on a hospital trolley.

After this, the family visit a medical health practitioner, possibly from CAMHS, who, on this very first visit, raises the subject of puberty blockers.

When Max’s dad mentions the fact that he’s heard most kids ‘grow out of it’, the idea is dismissed with the ominous prediction, “Puberty can be a ticking clock… gender dysphoria might escalate, might not.”

 

After dancing in the playground with some girls and being bullied on the way home by some boys, Max’s teenage sister tells him “ I think of you as my sister,” and he is ready to let her take him under her wing.

At the end of the first episode, Max comes downstairs with his sister, in a school skirt, make-up and a hairslide. “How do I look?” he asks his surprised family.

“You look lovely,” manages his mother.

On going to school dressed like this, Max says “I don’t want to do it but I feel I have to”.

It is as if Max has realised that the only way anyone is going to let him express his personality is if he forces himself into the ‘girl’ box.

“She,” he corrects his mother when she refers to him as ‘he’.

“She,” she breathes back.

The influence of ‘Mermaids’ is apparent throughout the first episode.  In the opening sequence, Max removes a mermaid necklace and a momentary close up reveals it to be very similar to the one  on the ‘Mermaids’ logo. In a visit to an aquarium with his dad, Max imagines a beautiful mermaid swimming over to him and trying to make contact with him through the glass. In a later scene, Max’s parents visit a support group and are told  “Listen to your child.” A Mermaids poster is clearly visible in the background.

Jake Hurfurt reports in the Mail that writer Tony Marchant and actress Anna Friel, who co-produced the program and plays Max’s mum, have ‘lavished praise on Mermaids’.

It comes as no surprise that CEO Susie Green, whose son underwent ‘gender reassignment surgery’ at just sixteen, and who advocates for under-16s access to cross-sex hormones, is listed in the credits as a series consultant.

“I can’t even begin to thank Susie Green enough for all the help she gave me.” gushes Friel.

This afternoon, with the first episode of Butterfly about to be released, the homepage of the Mermaids website was promising that their ‘helpline will be open until midnight on the 14th, 21st and 28th of October to coincide with the launch of new episodes.’

Today, Mermaids’ Twitter feed is full of scores of pictures of butterflies and scores of moving quotes from anonymous happy parents who have transitioned their children. Gender critical parents have made their own version of the mermaids hashtag.

 

In fact, apart from the obvious idea of emerging from a cocoon, I really can’t work out why they called the program ‘Butterfly’ in the first place. “Mermaid” would be a far more appropriate title, as at times the show verges on little more than a glorified advert for the contentious and controversial charity.

For a production with a fair level budget, ‘Butterfly’ isn’t very well put together. The acting is excellent but the writing is weak, a frequent flaw of ‘message pieces’.

While questing to become compelling characters, the actors struggle with the challenge of becoming something more than mouthpieces for the message. This was nowhere more notable than in the painfully gauche scene where Max’s sister tells him he should correct people who refer to him as ‘he’ and that she thinks of him as her sister not her brother.

The editing is also somewhat haphazard. Scenes seemed mashed together, rather than paced, which leaves the viewer feeling as if they’ve just watched one long trailer.

Of course, it isn’t meant to be real.  It’s a story. It’s a fictional show. It’s prime time TV drama.  But the show pushes the sexist and homophobic narrative that a boy liking dancing, pretty things and pink is reason enough for not just concern, but medical intervention.  I wonder to what extent the self-congratulatory adult crew involved with making it have seriously thought about that.

In addition, the beautification and idealisation of attempted suicide in this show, and the way that it gets Max what he wants (his dad moves back home because of it) may give mixed messages to other confused kids.  Writer Marchant has suggested that “kids going through this, with or without the support of their parents” might watch the show and get “some sense of what we need to do, that this is ok.” 

What he doesn’t seem to be asking is how many effeminate little boys are going to watch or hear about this show and decide that they too must be ‘born in the wrong body’? How many well-meaning teachers will watch the show and wonder if little Tommy isn’t just a bit quiet and effeminate after all- perhaps he is a transgender child?!   How many parents, concerned their child might be gay or doesn’t comply with gender norms, may decide it’s because their child is really transgender?

 

How many of those little boys will end up getting ‘fixed’ like Max?