What It Feels Like for a Girl: a 'fearless and compelling' coming-of-age drama

"What It Feels Like for a Girl" is a long way from your "typical female bildungsroman", said Rachel Aroesti in The Guardian. The eight-part series has been adapted for television from Paris Lees' "excellent" memoir recalling her life as a working-class teenager called Byron growing up in a small Nottinghamshire town.

Seen by others as a boy, our protagonist's early gender dysphoria is "angrily dismissed by their macho father", and the idea of one day living openly as a woman feels unfathomable. But Byron's eventual transition isn't what makes this show an "extraordinary and at times deeply disturbing account of a partly misspent youth".

Unlike a typical coming-of-age tale that "moves linearly towards success and validation", morality is presented as something that's "murky and fluid, just like sexuality and gender, and equally in thrall to the fickle whims of the heart", said Nick Hilton in The Independent.

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Turning best-selling writers' memoirs into television is nothing new, said India Block in London's The Standard. However, Lees' "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" takes things to a new level.

Less than 20 minutes into the show there's a "surreal dream ballet about a teenager sucking off men for crumpled fivers in a public loo": this is "post-watershed TV on steroids". While "What it Feels Like for a Girl" is "definitely not for family viewing", it's certainly a "fearless and compelling" show.

Ellis Howard as Byron is a "star in the making", guarding the teenager's "fragile vulnerability" with a "too-quick mind and a lacerating tongue". And Jake Dunn is terrifying as Liam – the "volatile" criminal who "gently proffers ketamine under Byron's nostril one moment and pulls a knife on him the next".

Arriving on BBC3 weeks after the Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex, the show comes at a "critical point in LGBTQ+ history", said Emily Baker in The i Paper. But it doesn't "fall into the trap of educating or being overtly political"; instead, it thoughtfully examines how class intersects with sexuality and gender, while also being an "utter riot".

As a "fogey" seeking "bunion-friendly shoes", I didn't expect to enjoy this coming-of-age tale about a "bullied, working-class teenager" so much, said Carol Midgley in The Times. "But what do you know? The series is very bingeable." It's hilarious, heartbreaking and "sharply written", and I was amazed how quickly I finished all eight episodes.