A new three-part drama Butterfly starts Sunday 14th October at 9pm on ITV.

Created and written by BAFTA award-winning screenwriter Tony Marchant, Butterfly is a drama about the complex relationship between separated parents, Vicky (Anna Friel) and Stephen (Emmett J. Scanlan), and their division in opinion over how to support their child, Max (Callum Booth-Ford). From a young age, Max has identified as a girl but has tried to suppress these feelings in an attempt to earn Stephen’s approval.

Tips for journalists covering ITV’s Butterfly

To help those covering Butterfly, we’ve put together some basic answers to some common questions.

How do I refer to the main character?

How do I describe their experience?

What does a “transgender girl” mean?

How to describe “blockers” and other info

What organisations could I signpost to?

How do I refer to the main character?

The story shows that Maxine has felt she was a girl from a very young age, even if those around her took a while to realise and accept that.

Max or Maxine is a transgender girl, or trans girl. Both terms are accurate and absolutely fine to use in this case.

Instead of using “he”, use “she”, or refer to her simply as Max or Maxine throughout. Our advice is that you avoid referring to the character as a boy.

You could also say that the parents “thought they had a son”, when talking about the trans girl’s early years. Sometimes trans children will say things like “when everyone thought I was a boy”, when talking about the past.

Here is a letter from a mum of a trans girl. This goes into detail as to why using “she” to describe Maxine is the most accurate term. It is also helpful in explaining the experience of trans people and children like Maxine, which is less of a transformation from one gender to another, and more of an emergence of the gender they’ve known themselves to be from a very young age.

How do I describe their experience?

It’s not entirely accurate to describe trans children as “choosing to live as a girl/boy”, in the same way we wouldn’t say someone “chooses to live as a gay person”.

It is more accurate to say, for example, that “Max knows she is not a boy”, or “Max knows herself to be a girl”, or “Max wants to be accepted as the girl she knows herself to be.”

What does a “transgender girl” mean?

A transgender girl is a girl whose gender identity doesn’t match the sex on their birth certificate.

For example, the doctor may have said they were a boy when they were born, but the child has insisted over several months and years that this doesn’t feel right – they know they’re a girl.

In Butterfly, the character of Max is a trans girl, a child who has insisted over several years that she is not a boy, but a girl.

The general rule for determining whether a child is transgender (rather than gender variant) is if the child is consistent, insistent, and persistent about their trans identity. If the character of Max was a boy that wanted to wear dresses sometimes, or said on a few occasions that he wanted to be a girl, then he most likely wouldn’t be transgender.

How to describe “blockers” and other info

Puberty blockers are fully reversible medication which puts a pause on puberty, and is only prescribed following assessment and after early puberty has begun.

They have been used since the 1970s to treat precocious puberty and prescribed to transgender children since the 1990s.

Transgender adolescents have to be around 16 years old to be given cross sex hormones on the NHS (oestrogen for a transgender teenage girl and testosterone for a trans teenage boy).

Children can’t have gender affirming surgery in the UK – you have to be 18. The long waiting times (up to 4 years on the NHS) means that this is often much later.

What organisations could I signpost to?

Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence are national organisations, supporting trans children and young people, and their families.

If you have any more questions, please check out our trans children briefing sheet, or get in touch with us.

If you would like to see these tips for journalists covering ITV’s Butterfly as a PDF, you can download and share it here.