It was a hot day; the kind of day when, Noel Coward had said, only mad dogs and Englishmen went out in the noonday sun. Even the insects were lying low, in shady homes out of the sun. Minerva McGonagall sat under an oak tree on a hill, overlooking a flock of sheep. Unlike most sheep, these had wool of bright primary colors, a sure sign that they belonged to a Wizard family. Minerva was reading, a detective novel. It was one she'd read before, though, several times, and the actions of the mustachioed Belgian sleuth weren't really holding her attention.
Far off, there was a scream, and Minerva's head snapped up, her heart beating faster as she reached for her staff... but no, she thought with a sigh of relief, it wasn't a scream. It was only the steam whistle of the train pulling towards Hogsmeade station. Minerva laughed at herself. "Silly old bat," she said, settling herself again, trying to find the page she'd been reading. "Only the train."
"Do not think," Albus had said, when Minerva was a third year student at Hogwarts, and he was the Transfiguration master, "that knowing the name of a thing means that you know what the thing is." At 14, that had seemed a revelation to her. She had spent weeks making up new names for common things, to prove to herself that names were only labels, and that labels had only the power people gave them.
"Hand me the snicker-snockers," she had said to Seraphimia Shacklebolt, pointing at the plate of cheese toast one night at dinner. The black girl had stared at Minerva, shaken her head, and passed it.
"Honestly, Minerva," she'd said, "I don't see why you don't just write Dumbledore a love letter, and get it over with. You could even write it in this silly language you've invented, and he'd never know."
How Minerva's cheeks had burned! After that, she'd refrained from using her own names for things... at least in public. She'd never written Albus a love letter, either... then, or later, during all the years they were masters together at the school. But her memory of that snide comment had come back to her, years later, when Tangela Wyberg had brought her Quenella Loveguard's notebook, with the girl's translations of Sappho's poems, and the surprisingly imaginative drawings of McGonagall herself.
Minerva had given Wyberg a lecture on respecting the privacy of other girls, and on betrayal of trust, before assigning her a week's worth of detentions. Wyberg had muttered about the betrayal of trust having Loveguard in her dormitory was; had used a name... but she had let the matter drop when Minerva glared at her. Later, the professor arranged to have one of the house elves discretely return the notebook to Loveguard's trunk.
When, a few years later, Shannon Keough had lined up to go up to the boy's side of the dormitory on her first night in Gryffindor tower, Minerva had at first thought she was another like Loveguard. Albus, however, had shaken his head. "Gender dysphoria, the muggles call it," he'd said, gravely. "Poor things, they think that naming something means understanding it." He had sighed, stroking his long beard. "We must respect the family's wishes, of course," he'd added after a pause, and that was that... for a few years, anyway.
Keough had turned out to be surprisingly good at transfiguration, and in her fifth year, she'd come to McGonagall for help. It was the hardest spell McGonagall had ever guided a student through, harder even than the animagus spells, but Keough's will had driven her on. As Sean Keough, he'd taken a NEWT in transfiguration, and left Hogwarts as a charming young man. McGonagall had taught his son as well, though the boy had none of the father's amazing skill at transfiguration... perhaps because he'd not shared the father's motivation.
Minerva sighed, and closed her book. No, she thought, knowing a thing's name was not the same as knowing what a thing was. She picked up her staff, and used it to lever herself into a standing position, awkwardly. She had known the word 'arthritis,' for instance, as a young woman, but it wasn't until it had come on her that she'd really understood it. Slowly, McGonagall walked home. What, she wondered, had happened to Loveguard? Those drawings... they really had been quite imaginative.
