The Girl Who Lived
What if Harry Potter was a trans girl? What if The Boy Who Lived was actually... The Girl Who Lived?
I'm not entirely sure if this is a fanfic or just a really long headcanon/AU. It's a bit short and not very good, but I'm going to post it anyway. Because it matters. Because it's important that we Potterheads speak up and let the world know that we aren't transphobic. Everyone is welcome in our fandom. The Harry Potter books are very important to a lot of LGBT+ people, so I've decided to disown JK Rowling. Which I'm doing by spreading trans headcanons and fics as a way of reclaiming the Harry Potter universe. Because f*ck JK Rowling.
(TW: mentions of homophobia and transphobia, mention of conversion therapy)
Harry Potter, who wished to be a girl all her life. Who tried dragging her aunt to the girl's section, only to be met with anger and disgust. Who was forced to wear her cousin's hand-me-downs even though she wanted girl's clothes, who was bullied by her classmates until she forced herself to pretend to be a boy just for the sake of fitting in.
When she first asked for girl's clothes, she was locked in the closet for the rest of the day. Her aunt and uncle had been distant, but not downright cruel, until the day she told them she wanted to be a girl, when she was five years old. It wasn't normal, they told her. And if there was anything the Dursleys detested, it was things that weren't normal. They told her that she could never tell anyone, that it would ruin their reputation.
A few weeks later, for Christmas, she asked for a doll. She didn't get anything, and from that day on, all her presents were bottle caps or tissues.
At school, Dudley told his friends that Harry wanted to be a girl, and soon the whole class knew and she was no longer safe at school, where people laughed at her and slammed her into walls in the hallway. From then on, it only got worse; Dudley and his friends beating her up during recess, her aunt and uncle locking her in the closet and threatening to take her to a doctor that would 'heal' her. That scared her, and she stopped asking them for girl things.
By the time she was eleven, she'd learned to keep her mouth shut about it. She kept her head down, always ready to fight off bullies, and forced herself to be a boy, to forget about all this nonsense. It had only given her trouble.
When she went to Hogwarts, she went as Harry James Potter, The Boy Who Lived. She always hated that title. She liked her name, but it didn't feel right, like it couldn't be hers.
She slept in the boys' dorm room, of course, and it was fun to sleep in the bed next to her friend Ron's, but it didn't feel right. Like she didn't belong there. She usually waited to get changed until no one was there, feeling uncomfortable changing while the boys were there.
When she found the Mirror of Erised in her first year, she looked at her reflection and, to her surprise, saw a girl standing there, with a black-haired man with glasses and a red-haired woman with green eyes standing behind her. Harry looked over her shoulder, but no girl was standing there. Then whose reflection was this?
The girl had her black hair and green eyes, her glasses and clothes. Harry suddenly recognized the two people behind her. Her parents, James and Lily.
And the girl, that was her. She was sure of that. But why?
She didn't tell anyone, not even Ron, about the fact that she looked like a girl in the mirror, not a boy. She was very grateful for that when Dumbledore told her what the mirror did a few weeks later. Why would a mirror that showed her her deepest desires show her herself, but as a girl? Was that what she wanted the most? To be a girl?
But she shut her mouth and didn't tell anyone about how she felt, because she'd learned from elementary school and the Dursleys that it was 'wrong' and 'weird', even though keeping it a secret made her unhappy. Even when professor McGonagall pulled her aside one day to ask if she was okay, she didn't tell her about it.
In her third year, Hagrid showed the class unicorns and made them help him with feeding them. He told the boys to keep their distance, as unicorns didn't like males. Harry did as she was told and stayed away from the unicorns, instead strolling through the forest, making sure to stay close enough to the rest of the class. Once she was away from the boys, a unicorn approached her and licked her hand.
'Huh,' said Hagrid, 'They normally don't like boys. Guess you're special, Harry.' He looked at her a bit strangely, like he wanted to ask her something but didn't quite know how to start. Harry shrugged it off.
A few weeks later, Harry woke up in the middle of the night because of Ron, who was screaming and said something about Sirius Black standing over his bed. Not quite sure what to do, Neville went to get professor McGonagall. Harry grabbed her wand, realizing that if Black had really been her, he might still be inside. She had to warn the girls!
She didn't remember that the stairs turned into a slide whenever a boy stepped foot on them when she climbed the stairs to the girls' dormitories, and she was too panicked to care about the rules anyway.
'Wake up!' she shouted. She bursted into the third years' dorm room, afraid something might've happened to Hermione, and found her classmates staring at her.
'Are you okay?' she asked, panting. 'Ron saw Sirius Black, but he's gone, have you seen anything?'
'No,' said Hermione slowly, 'we were asleep. But how... How did you get in here?'
'What?'
'The stairs. They turn into a slide when a boy tries to climb them, so how did you manage...'
'I... I don't know,' Harry said.
They dropped the subject and went to the common room, where McGonagall tried to calm everyone down. The rest of the night was spent in the Great Hall while teachers searched the Gryffindor Tower. Harry lay between Ron and Hermione, eyes closed, but she couldn't sleep. Why had the stairs let her up?
The next day, Hermione pulled her aside. They sat down under a tree were no one would hear them and that's when Hermione asked the question Harry feared so much.
'Harry, have you ever... Have you ever wanted to be a girl?'
Harry looked away, unable to look her in the eyes. She hadn't told anyone about this since she was five years old. But this was Hermione, her friend. She could trust her, right?
'Yes,' she said, her voice barely a whisper.
And that's when Hermione told her about something she'd read about last summer.
Transgender. The word was constantly in Harry's mind as she followed her classes, unable to pay attention. No one blamed her, though, everyone knew Black was looking for her.
The week after that, Hermione introduced her to a girl in her fourth year, a nice girl with dark skin, long, curly hair and a pretty smile. A girl who was born a boy.
They talked for hours, and slowly, everything Harry had felt started coming together. She told Ron the next day. He just smiled.
'Guess you're the girl who lived now, huh?'
She told a few other friends, but the most memorable interaction was with Fred and George.
'Does that mean you like boys now?' George asked.
She had to think about that for a moment. Did it? She'd never thought about liking boys before. The Dursleys had alway taught her that boys who liked boys were disgusting and weird, so she'd never realized that could be a possibility.
But now that she thought about it, she really liked the way Cedric's hair looked when he was flying in the sun, and his smile made her all giggly and light-headed. Though she felt that way with some girls too, like Cho Chang.
'I don't know,' she admitted. 'I guess I'll find out eventually.'
The first teacher she told was Lupin, the second was McGonagall. They decided to take things slow, to give Harry time to get used to the changes.
First, she tried on some of Hermione's robes. Hermione was only a bit shorter, so they fit her pretty well. When Harry looked at her reflection in the middle, a huge grin appeared on her face as she double-checked if this wasn't the Mirror of Erised. But no, this was real. It was really her - a girl.
She started thinking about a new name, a girl's name, and quickly decided on Lily Harriet. Her friends started calling her Lily, and a girl, though only when no one else was there to hear it. She didn't want anyone to know. Not yet.
That summer, she went to Diagon Alley with Hermione, to buy herself some girl's clothes. She'd grown her hair out too, something she'd never been allowed to do. The Dursleys had wanted to cut it, but they were too scared of her serial killer godfather to come close enough.
At the Quidditch World Cup, she slept in the girls' tent with Ginny and Hermione. It took her a moment to get used to it, but she loved the talk they had late in the evening, when they were all sleepy but also very excited. She noticed Ginny acted a lot more relaxed around her than she'd done all year, even though this must be confusing for her, too. Ginny'd had a crush on her last year, and as far as Lily knew she was straight. But she seemed at ease around her and Lily only caught her blushing once.
At the start of the fourth year, a girl with long, messy black hair, green eyes and glasses entered the train with her friends, attracting a lot of stares.
'Is that Harry Potter?' someone whispered.
'The Boy Who Lived?' a small boy shouted, staring at her.
'Actually, it's The Girl Who Lived,' Lily said. 'And my name is Lily Potter.'
Anyway, hope you enjoyed this little "F*ck JK Rowling"-fic. Let me know if you want another chapter with a short description of Lily's next few years, or let me know what other characters you headcanon as trans so I can write another fic.