AN: For the Quiddich League, 1,018 words. Prompt: Write a transgender character. I hope I portrayed Terry with accuracy and dignity.
Terry Boot didn't know when she first realized that she was a girl. It started with that everything in her nursery was blue, with stars. Acceptable for a wizard, but there was something inherently wrong about it. The sight of the pants she was expected to wear, the darker shades of color and the forced blue— blueblueblueblue— it all felt like it was closing in and was a suffocation.
But it was easy for her to ignore it then. Because she was still little, and she hadn't yet learned the little expectations and ideas about what a boy, a man, a wizard, a warlock should be, and what they shouldn't be— a girl, a witch, a woman.
No, it wasn't until Hogwarts that Terry realized that she was a girl— a witch. She still remembered that first night, seeing the castle for the first time. She didn't fit in anywhere, with her large wizarding family. Somehow, in all of the people and manors and cousins, there wasn't room for her. But that castle— it looked like home. She hoped it would be.
With her pants that felt too restrictive and the baggy sweater she wore to hide the flatness of her chest, she was drowning in fabric when McGonagall set the Sorting Hat on her head. She closed her eyes, and heard that little voice.
"Ah, another Boot— you may not fit in with your family, but you'll fit in in the house."
"Are you sure it's right for me?" Terry asked.
"You don't fit in because you haven't found yourself, yet," the Hat replied. "You'll find yourself in RAVENCLAW!"
The idea became a prophecy to Terry over the next seven years. But it started with the dormitories. She had sat and listened to the speech of a fifth-year Ravenclaw who was arrogant, yet still charismatic and frighteningly charming with his words, and then was dismissed to the staircase on the left, where the boys were.
There weren't enough beds. Her cheeks had gone redder and redder as she realized that there wasn't room for her— even here. Of course a house-elf— one who was very confused and mumbling about how they were sure that they'd gotten the ratio just right— went and got the canopy bed.
Terry didn't think anything of it or of the implications. And for a while, she was happy, and too busy with schoolwork and adjusting to a new place to even think about the ratio of beds, or the prophecy of an old hat.
Of course, that same unhappiness and loneliness crept back in. In how she tried to shower with her eyes close and dressed away from a mirror, because she didn't want to see that disappointingly flat chest. Something was wrong with her body, unappealing, as foreign to her as anyone else's. But why?
Terry was good at asking questions in her classes— helping her earn her good marks. But she'd never applied those questions towards her alien feelings. Perhaps because she was afraid. Perhaps because she did not understand.
In her second year, she drifted towards the girls in her year— Padma Patil, Morag MacDougal, Sue Li— all of them. It just wasn't the same with the boys in her year. Girls just felt right to talk to— they felt like her kind. But she still didn't apply her nosiness to her condition, instead never questioning why there were six boys and four girls in Ravenclaw, when the gender ratio was perfectly even elsewhere. But that is perhaps because the forty students in her year were oddly proportionally perfect— for there were some years in generations past where there was only one Hufflepuff girl in a dormitory, or only two children in Slytherin at all.
Surely there was nothing to notice? Was there?
Then third year came, with hormones and funny feelings— towards the other boys in her dormitory. Except she never thought of them as the other boys. Just as boys, a separate species entirely. But she liked them in a way that could only be described as. . . Romantic.
For a while, Terry thought she was just gay.
But then came her fourth year. She refused to let her mother cut her hair, preferring the shoulder-length hairstyle that had developed over time. It felt right, that it was long. And she looked to brighter colors for the formal occasion they were preparing for— until Madam Malkin had to inform her that the set of robes she wanted to try on were witches' robes.
It was Sophie Roper, another girl in her year, in Ravenclaw, that she told the story to.
"I'm surprised she didn't let you try," Sophie said. "You look plenty like a witch. And you act like one."
That was the spark of the idea. "Is it possible, for there to be boys who. . .Who are really girls, inside?"
"Oh, absolutely," Sophie said. "I have a muggle cousin— everyone thought he was a girl, including him, but when he got older, he realized what he truly was. That's a part of growing up, I think. Maybe you're really a girl— that's who you truly are. I mean, we have an unoccupied bed in our dormitory. The house-elves said we were supposed to have another roommate."
"Really?" It was as if everything had finally clicked into place for Terry. She then looked to the announcement board in Ravenclaw tower, flanked by pale blue silken curtains that moved like water— there it was again, blue!
There would be a Hogsmeade visit next week.
Terry turned to Sophie. "I want to try on a dress. At Hogsmeade."
"Sure," Sophie said. "You know, I think pink would look rather nice with your complexion, plus the brown hair and— what color eyes are those?"
"Somewhere between blue or green, I'm not sure," Terry admitted.
"Yes, that," Sophie agreed.
Terry would later shock all when she showed up on the arm of a pretty Beauxbatons boy, wearing the prettiest pink set of robes she'd ever seen. With Sophie's help, she was stunning— and most importantly herself— a witch.