Coming-of-age trans drama is raw, urgent and poignant

Paris Lees’ What It Feels Like for a Girl’ is both universal and rooted in the transgender experience

- Nick Hilton

It's hard to be a kid. You might not have to stare down the taxman, might not need to know how to parallel park or julienne a bell pepper, but the experience of being a half-formed thing is far trickier. This is the moment where BBC Three's new eight- part drama What It Feels Like for a Girl – a story both universal and also rooted in the transgender experience – picks up. The messy, uncertain, self-destructive, poignant life of a teenager.

Ellis Howard is Byron, a 15-year-old boy growing up in the Nottinghamshire town of Hucknall, part of a disrupted, explosive family, and dealing with life’s small questions, like their sexuality and gender. “I’m not a lad,” they tell an ice cream vendor, much to the frustration of dad Steve (Michael Socha), who has always dreamed of being a father to a football-loving little boy.

Only Byron’s grandma – played by Adolescence’s Hannah Walters – seems accepting. In this identity whirlwind, Byron discovers the appetites of grown men for a schoolchild, dispensing favours in the town’s public “bogs” in exchange for crumpled five-pound notes. Gradually, this entry into sex work becomes something bigger, pushing Byron away from their old friends and family, and into the hands of violent pimp Liam (Jake Dunn).