‘When you force people into the shadows, don’t be surprised when they go fucking dark.’

What It Feels Like for a Girl is the name of the newly released mini-series (Director: Brian Welsh, Writer: Paris Lees), on BBC iPlayer.

Based on the true story* of that of Nottingham-born trans woman, Paris Lees, it is a beautiful portrait of queer life in the early 2000s.

*What It Feels Like for a Girl was first told in a bestselling memoir of the same name.*

Lees, although now regarded as a highly successful journalist and a woman of many firsts (Lees was the first trans columnist to write for Vogue, for example), struggled a lot in her early years. The series, with its use of flashbacks throughout, shows us these struggles through the lens of Byron (played by 28-year-old Scouse actor, Ellis Howard).

In What It Feels Like for a Girl, we see Byron struggle with gender dysphoria from a very early age. Instead of being reconciled, though, their struggle is dismissed by their ‘macho’ father (Michael Socha), who considers Byron’s effeminacy to be a threat to his own masculinity. This fear is magnified when they reside in the very working-class Nottinghamshire town of Hucknall…

It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, having learnt about Byron’s controlled upbringing, that they went ‘off the rails’, as some might put it, at a similarly young age.

Having been told their whole life that they were ‘wrong’ simply for existing, Byron sought solace anywhere they could find it and, aged just 15, became a pimp for their older boyfriend Max (played by Calam Lynch) who groomed them into sex work.

As a rent boy, Byron was repeatedly exploited by older men who paid for underage sex in public toilets; ‘Ucknall’s finest. Byron’s pals, a group of like-minded trans and queer folk, however, the ‘Fallen Divas’, had Byron’s back every step of the way.

By no means marketed as being ‘just another sob story’, the focus of What It Feels Like for a Girl is not on grooming (as Paris said herself, it wasn’t until she read a review following the release of her memoir that she even recognised that what was happening to her was abuse), but on queer joy.

Through their friendships with the Fallen Divas, a bunch of chaotic, queer misfits, Byron comes to understand, finally, that they were, and always have been, a woman.

Welcome home, Paris…

Art at its rawest, at a time when trans rights are seemingly going in reverse, What It Feels Like for a Girl can be described as nothing other than a breath of fresh air.

As Ellis Howard, the actor who so beautifully portrayed Byron/Paris, said in an interview with the Digital Spy, ‘What It Feels Like for a Girl humanises a trans story, and gives a voice to a marginalised community that’s under attack.’

Whilst it is a deeply scary time, what the show hopefully does is offer some light amongst the darkness. The world is on fire right now, and this ragtag gang, this bunch of kids, are dancing in the flames. They’re not going down without a fight, and I think that is a really gorgeous thing, the energy of that, to hold onto.