I watched the third and final episode on Sunday. I enjoyed the series and I think that even people without a personal interest in transgender life could enjoy it and certainly benefit from watching it.
If anyone has seen documentaries about transgender children, they will not learn anything new about the technical aspects. However, dramatising a critical period in a transgender child's life does expose the strains on a family in a way that documentaries cannot. It also highlights the Catch 22 situation of negotiating Britain's nanny state to get help, i.e. if a child is in physical or emotional danger, it may alert the system to the needs of a child but in order to get the help she needs, the child and her family must be "in a good place". I know from my own experience of negotiating Britain's welfare system that you have to word everything very carefully and that something poorly phrased can mean the difference berween getting and not getting help.
My only real criticism is that the series was too short. There is little or no background information about how Maxine reached the stage at which she is presented to us. That could be even more frustrating for a viewer with lttle knowledge of transgender people.
The series did give me food for thought. In the OP, I mentioned that while watching the first episode, I was ashamed of feeling envy more than sympathy for Maxine. At the time, I was not even sure why I felt ashamed but after thinking about it, I realise that I was right to feel ashamed. It is bad enough that I could feel that way about a fictional character but I realise now that I and others can feel the same way about real trans people.
A young member mentioned once that some people focus on the good things in her life and think that she is spoiled and has had it too easy, while ignoring the more difficult aspects of her life. Piecing together her life from her many posts, I know that that young member lives in a place where people famously enjoy the great outdoors but she cannot venture into sunlight and has had skin cancer. Her family became broken not because she did anything wrong but because she exists and is a trans woman. At school she was bullied for years and even raped and from her posts I believe that because of her low self esteem, she believed that if she complained, people would say that she brought it on herself. Her posts show her to be compassionate but sometimes she seems to display poor social skills and cannot always predict the reaction to what she writes. (She confessed that she has had few real friends apart from her father and brother and that isolation is bound to result in reduced social skills.) In spite of all that, I ENVIED her because some members of her family were on her side, because she transitioned before it was too late to pass, because she has had SRS and most of all because she is young and beautiful.
Even if the only result of watching Butterfly was to make me ashamed and help me to understand why, it was worthwhile.
