ITV’s new Sunday-night drama, Butterfly, is as moving as it is distressing. Eleven-year-old Max (Callum Booth-Ford) likes feather boas and pink crop-tops. Max thinks he wants to be a girl, but his builder father is appalled. He slaps the boy, screams in his face, insists to Vicky, Max’s well-meaning mother (Anna Friel), that “it’s about us fixing him”. The parents separate under the strain. At school, Max is bullied for being a “freak”. His granny is an off-the-peg bigot.

The characters who question Max’s choice to become Maxine, and to go to school wearing a skirt, are pantomime villains. The drama unashamedly supports the transgender cause and leverages viewer sympathy to the, ahem, max.

There is a truly terrible scene where the boy attempts suicide. By the end of episode one, he is embarked on the road to girlhood, with a counsellor advocating “puberty blockers”.

Praised for its veracity, Tony Marchant’s drama worked closely with Mermaids UK, a charity that supports “gender diverse and transgender children”. In 2015, Mermaids’s CEO, Susie Green, told MPs that the NHS gender dysphoria clinic for young people was “a service where there is a 48 per cent suicide-attempt risk” – a figure that has been widely discredited.