Anna Friel and Max/Maxine (Callum Booth-Floyd) in Butterfly

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WHEN Susie Green’s then son, Jack, announced he wanted to be a girl at the age of four, she was understandably in a state of shock, disbelief and emotional turmoil. And for the next two years, Susie tried to ignore her child’s pleas that “God had made a mistake”, insisting he didn’t have to change gender just to play with a girl’s toy. Yet eventually, after watching Jack suffer and become increasingly insular, Susie realised it was she who was in denial and bravely took the decision to get professional help. Now the emotional rollercoaster journey that both Susie and Jackie – as Jack became – then embarked on is being drawn upon by ITV in a new three-part prime-time drama, Butterfly, which looks sensitively into the issues surrounding parents who have a child who identifies as transgender.

Anna Friel plays mum Vicky, who has to confront the issue when her son Max, played by Callum BoothFloyd, tells her he is a girl. Emmett J Scanlan plays dad Stephen. For Susie, who acted as a consultant, the drama is a brilliant reflection of what happened to her. “Watching this drama ahead of it being screened made me cry,” she confides. “My daughter is 25 now and is living a very happy life. But seeing the things in the drama that applied to me when she was growing up made me wonder how on earth I coped at the time. “The issue of transgender people is still a taboo subject and I am really pleased ITV has made Butterfly. It has been handled so sensitively.” Reflecting on the moment Jackie told her she was a girl, Susie confides: “She was very direct at four and she told me: ‘God’s made a mistake, I should have been a girl.’ I denied it and said ‘No, you are a boy. You like girl things. You don’t have to be a girl to like girls’ toys.’ She replied: ‘I am not a boy, I am a girl.’ It took me two years to stop denying that she was a girl. And that was two years of making her sad. During that period she was lonely and miserable with no self-confidence.

“Now I know that when I said ‘No you are a boy’, she took it as rejection. After she asked me when she could have an operation, I decided I couldn’t ignore it any longer. I had to do something, so I typed into the advice website Ask Jeeves ‘My son wants to be a girl’ and that’s when I found Mermaids, a charity that helps families with gender-diverse and transgender children – and which I now run as CEO.” It was Mermaids that put Susie in touch with the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation, which diagnosed Jackie, at the age of seven, with gender dysphoria. This is a condition in which an individual feels their emotional and psychological identity as male or female is the opposite of their biological sex. “I’d had three more children by this time – a boy and identical twin boys – and then me and her dad separated,” Susie continues. “Her dad didn’t get it at all and we did eventually split up. But it was nothing do with Jackie. We’d been fighting all the time. “But when we split, I did have more freedom to allow her to express herself at home. Up until then she’d had some toys but not really much other than that. After that, Jackie started living as a girl at home.

Jackie Green as a ski girl in Italy

She was bullied every single day and two weeks later she took her first overdose Susie Green

“At the age of eight, she was allowed to attend school as a girl. I was so frightened about what it would be like for her and I was a bag of nerves on the first day. But the school handled it brilliantly. They refused to tolerate bullying and Jackie changed overnight. She was a totally different child and so much happier.” However, at age 11 Jackie moved on to her local secondary school and life became hell. “On her first day, a fully grown young man put his head around the door and asked ‘Where is the freak?’” recalls Susie. FROM that moment onwards Jackie was annihilated. “She was bullied every single day and two weeks later she took her first overdose. I was at work and my niece phoned to tell me Jackie had taken a lot of paracetamol. It turned out she had taken 16 tablets. She wasn’t unconscious but we rushed her straight to hospital to do some checks. Thankfully she was OK. “This was the start of a further six more attempts to take her life. It got to a point where every time the phone rang, I feared it would be someone telling me my daughter was dead. I had long conversations with Jackie and would regularly go into her room to check there wasn’t any paracetamol hoarded away. But every time I did she would go shoplifting for more.”

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The constant abuse precipitated each attempt. Every day, someone would call her a tranny and a freak. One boy spat in her face and called her a “he she”. Many other times people would try to lift her skirt in the playground or attempt to pull her pants down and shout “Have you cut off your d**k, Jack?” “So bad was the bullying that we were on first name terms with the hate crime police protection officers. And it got to a point where I started to question why I was forcing her to go to a school when she was suffering so much. “I cried constantly and it is in intensely diffi cult situations like this where you really realise who your friends are. Many parents who didn’t know me felt it was their right to give me advice and tell me I would save Jackie if I didn’t let her be a girl. “But as a parent of a transgender child, this is by far and away the wrong thing to do. You must support them in their identity. You can’t change the outcome. My close friends were so supportive, as were her three brothers. One of them, Connor, would regularly find himself in fights with other children as my sons all hated seeing Jackie so sad.” By now, Jackie had changed her name officially.

Jackie at 18 with Susie in 2011, a year before she reached the semi-finals of Miss England

She and Susie also started flying to Boston in the US to get blockers to help stop the hormonal change as part of a decision for Jackie to have surgery when she was 16. They did this every six months. And yet amid all of this – and the bullying – Susie still forced Jackie to attend school. “I wanted her to have an education,” she says. “But it got to a point where I did decide to put her in a different school. I had to write a letter to explain why and so I asked her: ‘What happens to you on a daily basis?’ And she said, ‘I would carry on for ever if I told you, mum’. “She was allowed to move but kids from the old school came to the new one and told them. The bullying started again. “The turning point where I realised enough was enough came when Jackie returned home with cystitis. They wouldn’t let her use the girls’ toilets and so she didn’t go at all. I knew I couldn’t send her back and at the age of 14, pulled her out.

“The educational welfare officer managed to find her a place in a unit for children with long-term illnesses as it was impossible for Jackie to go into mainstream school. She attended as a girl and she was much happier. At 16, she left the special unit with three GCSEs.” She then underwent gender affirmation surgery in Thailand – after Susie raised £28,000 to pay for the operation and flights by remortgaging her house – because such treatment was not performed on under18s in the UK. In doing so, Jackie became the youngest person ever to have the procedure. For the first time in her life, she was the person she always knew she was – Susie’s daughter. She returned to Thailand for a £2,000 breast augmentation operation when she was 18 and a year later entered the Miss England beauty pageant and reached the semi-finals, and featured in a BBC Three documentary.

Susie raised £28,000 for pay for Jackie's operation