Paris Lees’ What it Feels Like For a Girl is a novel about what it felt like to grow up working-class and a girl, who is also trans, in the early 2000s in Britain. It is a story of violence, neglect, sexual exploitation, and abuse, and also one about finding joy in mischief and making trouble, partying, and taking things to extremes. Lees’ autobiographical novel shows us the importance and comfort of finding a community which accepts and loves you—in her case extended family members and a chosen queer community—when you have been brutalised by the world at large. It is a book of fierce, undisguised, working-class ambition, driven by the desire to tell your own story, in your own voice, without apology or any attempt to make things nice for the reader.

What it Feels Like For a Girl starts with an introduction to Byron at around 13 years old, bullied and beaten up for not being ‘male’ enough: for looking and acting like a girl, for being thought to be ‘queer’ both by local kids and by Byron’s father, who hopes to knock masculinity into his son. Byron comes to question whether the bullies are right after all: what if they really are more a girl than a boy? Set in Lees’ hometown of Hucknall, seven miles from Nottingham, the story charts Byron’s—then Paris’s—difficult relationship with her parents: abandonment by a mother who does a Shirley Valentine and moves abroad with a boyfriend, violence and neglect from her father, being raised by her grandmothers and an auntie.

Due to a combination of poverty and a feeling of being starved of attention and affection, Byron becomes in her own words a ‘rent boy’, and it is these scenes that are among the most difficult to read. In these passages Byron is pleased with the attention of these older men, feeling finally special and worth something, and also enjoying actually having a bit of cash. It’s something so taken for granted by people that grew up with access to nice clothes and technology, but when you grew up poor, being able to buy nice clothes, or CDs, or make-up, or whatever, can be transformative to your sense of having value in the world. As readers, we are aware of what Byron, being essentially a child, is not. In an interview with Rebecca Nicholson, Lees explains that at the time she didn’t think of it as abuse, and that it’s taken her many years to understand what had actually happened. ‘I wasn’t forced, but it was statutory rape. What would you call it? If somebody in their 30s or their 40s was having sex with a 14-year-old? It’s abuse. And I wanted you to be horrified.’

Lees succeeds in showing the abhorrent realities of how vulnerable teenagers are exploited without anyone seeming to notice. But for all the trauma, this is a very funny book. Byron/Paris is a wickedly funny narrator who tells us of her exploits with the ‘Fallen Divas’, a group of queer and trans friends she meets while clubbing underage in Nottingham, with absolute relish. The book is written in a working-class Midlands’ colloquial speech, rather than standardised middle-class southern English, and so Lees’ prose retains the unique humour of conversations and personalities of people from that time and place.

Byron/Paris’s life takes a turn for the worse when she can’t quite get off the merry-go-round of staying up all night and taking drugs, only to wake up feeling awful and to begin again. Her mental health deteriorates further when she’s co-opted into the robbery of a punter and some time later is sentenced to two years in a young offender’s prison. Although released at 18 years old after eight months with a curfew, the experience was a shattering wake-up call to the ambitious Paris: the odds of becoming a ‘repeat offender’ and ending up back in prison spurned her on, or scared her shitless enough, to go back to college and in turn get a place at university. The book’s end is open, but what we do know is that Paris is safe and sound in her new flat in Brighton, about to study for a degree.

So far, most discussions around this book focus on the fact that Paris Lees, like her fictionalised younger self in this autobiographical book, is trans. The increasingly hostile and transphobic situation in Britain understandably makes the publication of a new book by a successful trans woman a victory, and so the trans narrative of the book has become the focus. Yet Lees has distanced herself from this, telling Rebecca Nicholson ‘this is only a trans book if every other memoir is a “woman book” or a “man book”. I can’t write a book in which I’m not trans, because I am, and obviously it is relevant. But, as far as I’m concerned, I’ve written a book about growing up poor and bullied and abused at a certain point in history.’

In many ways this is a classic story of class mobility, of a young working-class woman’s escape from a difficult background with limited opportunities via the lifeline of higher education. In fact, What it Feels Like For a Girl fits neatly into an already existing history of women from working-class backgrounds getting degrees, becoming journalists, artists and academics, and writing memoirs. Carolyn Steedman wrote about growing up poor in the 1950s, and her Tory mother’s painful aspirations, in Landscape for A Good Woman (1986). In Bad Blood (2000), Lorna Sage wrote of becoming pregnant at 16 in 1959, raising her baby, and still managing to be awarded a scholarship to undertake her degree. Tracey Reynolds’ essays from the 1990s discussed the complex power differences between working-class women of different races, and her experiences of racism and classism within academia, while Lynsey Hanley writes of growing up in council estates and the psychological impact of class – the way it builds “walls in the head” in Estates: An Intimate History (2012).

But the closest book to Lees’ is Carol Morley’s 7 Miles Out (2015), an autobiographical novel telling the story of her father’s suicide at the age of 13 and her subsequent teenage drinking, promiscuity, and involvement in Manchester’s music scene in the 1980s. Like Lees’ book it is also heartfelt, messy and funny, told without shame or apology. Lees’ book enriches and complicates this history of autobiographical texts – although they all deal with the varieties of working-class female experience, the majority of these texts tend to foreground straight cis women. Lees’ book conjoins the LGBTQ struggles for equality with class conflicts, showing that class impacts the lives of LGBTQ people, and vice versa.

In writing the story of a past that she was traumatised by, Lees kicks back against a simple victim narrative by drawing her readers into the complexities of her world growing up, the humour, the friendships, the music (each chapter is named after a different song), the antics, and her ultimate successes, and forces us not to look away. What happens to Paris in this book is political: it may have taken place decades ago, but working-class kids are no less vulnerable now, and still have to struggle just as hard to get off the track that leads to low-paid precarious work, prison for petty crimes, dangerous overpriced housing, and decreasing access to education. Lees’ ambition, ability, and luck in being able to escape the violence of structural poverty now place her in a position to have her writing published and make lives like hers visible. Yet young working-class kids and trans young people are still not being protected – with over a decade of Tory austerity and the rise of right-wing transphobia being normalised in British media, it forces the question: how safe does it feel for a girl right now, in 2021?