There’s a surreal dream ballet about a teenager sucking off men for crumpled fivers in a public loo less than 20 minutes into the first episode of How It Feels Like For A Girl, and it’s brilliant. It’s also pretty out there for a BBC production that also features more stunt penis than all three seasons of The White Lotus combined. This is post Watershed TV on steroids.
What It Feels Like For A Girl is an adaptation of Paris Lee’s 2021 memoir of the same name, recalling her teen years as a young person she calls Byron. Loosely adapted from and riffing off her real life, she places Byron in Hucknall, a bus ride away from Nottingham.
Turning popular writers’ memoirs into television has been fertile ground for TV execs. See: Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love, or Caitlin Moran’s Raised By Wolves. But their life stories don’t come close to Lee’s wilder-than-fiction youth, filled with underage sex work (that Lees now understands as statutory rape), armed robbery and a stint in prison before she’d even sat her A-levels.
For A Girl doesn’t gloss over the messy bits. There’s a lot of sex, drugs, and 2000s dance music. Scenes with predatory older men, from dirty doggers to corrupt coppers, are harrowing for the most part. But it also thrills with its portrayal of teenage transgression, as Byron grows into their identity as a problem child who sneaks into nightclubs and falls in with a crowd of miscellaneous queers self-titled the Fallen Divas.
If they had a motto it would be ‘be gay, do crimes’, and it comes complete with an electric, catty rivalry with fellow diva Sasha, played by Hannah Jones, and Laquarn Lewis as Lady Die, a podium-dancing sexpot by night who code-switches to a masc black man when required.
Byron’s burgeoning transition isn’t the point. This is their girlhood, and Howard owns the show as Byron, though, whose fragile vulnerability is guarded by a too-quick mind and a lacerating tongue. You don’t know whether you want to split a pill with them or give them a hot bath and malty drink. Howard is a star in the making.
It’s the cis men in For A Girl that are the tragic figures. Steve (Michael Socha), Byron’s local hardman dad, is weighed down by his dogged belief that if he blasts his son with enough toxic masculinity he can make him a man. Jake Dunn terrifies as Liam, a volatile small-time criminal who gently proffers ketamine under Byron’s nostril one moment and pulls a knife on him the next. The show doesn’t beat you over the head with it, but it’s clear who finds the restraints and expectations of gender more stifling.
For A Girl is best when it plays with form. There’s the aforementioned cottaging dance number. A hilarious chip shop sequence where two trans girls transport Byron to the bedroom to discuss the finer details of all things dick-related. An unnerving nightmare about a robbery that turns into an erotic gun fellating sequence. It’s a show that’s prepared to sashay along the knife edge of everything compelling and horrifying about Byron’s experience.
Calling a show seminal when it features more than one blowjob spit-take feels on the nose. But For A Girl is fearless and compelling TV (though definitely not for family viewing).
But at eight 50-minute episodes, it does drag in places. It’s hard to tell if weeks have passed, or just 24 hours. Turn of the millennium Nottingham and its surrounds have been recreated so spookily accurately it made me briefly homesick. But some of the costuming is a little rose-tinted. The Divas look like they’ve either stepped off a Girls Aloud music video set or rinsed the Y2K hashtag on Depop. Hangovers and comedowns don’t seem to exist. I swear we never looked that good back then, but it does make the show a visual feast to watch as it bounces between grotty clubs and grottier flats.
Unfortunately, one must mention the context and the discourse of it all. This is a story populated by messy young trans women and queers in the early 2000s. We’re 25 years on and LGBTQ+ rights are backsliding, with trans women at the sharpest end.
I was originally going to praise the BBC for making such a fulsome show about the experience of a working-class trans woman, given the broadcaster’s tendency to both-sides LGBTQ+ rights as though it’s up for debate. Then they published a feature on For A Girl that lead on disparaging quotes from anti-trans activist Maya Forrester. Old habits die hard perhaps, but at least this show got made before the mask was fully removed.
What It Feels Like For A Girl is streaming on BBC Three and iPlayer from June 3
