It was the first day of a fresh term at the Academy of Magical Arts and the air crackled with excitement as the children took their seats in the Great Hall. The new students, young and fresh-faced, had been allotted seats at the front where they had an unobstructed view of the raised platform where the Head Wizard and other members of the teaching staff waited for the children to settle.
The hall was a fine example of late Gothic architecture with its stone columns rising to a rib vault ceiling and its pointed arches inset with stained glass windows. To the left, the windows featured scenes of wizardly prowess drawn from the Academy’s own ancient lore; to the right, a procession of the Academy’s luminaries literally illuminated by a brilliant morning light shining through the glass. Had the children been older and more attuned to affairs of the world, they might have appreciated that the grandeur of their surroundings demanded a tuition that only the most privileged could afford, billionaire fantasy authors, for example.
The Head Wizard rose and greeted the children with a tired speech he had delivered year after year until now, well on his way to senescence, the best he could manage was a somnolent drone. The aging pedagogue thought to himself how much he hated the little shits and prayed that none of them possessed enough natural ability to read his mind. He concluded his greeting by announcing that it was time for the sorting hat and he surrendered the proceedings to his number two.
A buzz rose from the children, none of whom knew anything about a sorting hat. On acceptance to the Academy, the children had received reams of printed material describing everything from payment to code of conduct to curriculum to travel instructions. But nowhere did the printed material mention a sorting hat.
The Head Wizard’s number two, a benevolent woman with a not-so-secret addiction to certain potions, rose from her seat and settled the children with soothing tones. The sorting hat was nothing to worry about. Just a fun way to divide the student body into its appropriate groups. She explained that each new student would take a turn putting the sorting hat on their head and the sorting hat would assign them to their proper group and, as a bonus, it would assign their proper pronouns.
After the greater part of the student body had submitted to the game, the children began to recognize a pattern. Invariably, the sorting hat took the children who had penises and put them in the boy group and assigned them the he/him pronouns. As for the children with vaginas, the sorting hat put them in the girl group and assigned them the she/her pronouns.
The process was quite orderly until one of the children with a vagina (whom the hat had put into the girl group) corrected the benevolent elderly teacher when the old woman referred to them as her.
The child said they were non-binary and insisted on being addressed as they/them. All their life, people had called them she/her but it didn’t line up with the way they experienced their body in the world.
Are you suggesting that the sorting hat is wrong? The benevolent woman’s tone was not so much patronizing as indignant.
I don’t know that it’s a matter of right or wrong? Right and wrong are simple binaries, just like boy/girl, and that’s the problem. In a way, I feel sorry for the hat for having such a limited view of human experience. One of the reasons I’ve come to the Academy is to find a magic that might transform my body so that it lines up with how I feel.
The Head Wizard wasn’t having any more from the precocious shit and interjected, speaking with more force than at any other time that morning: This is the way they’d always done things. They trusted the hat. The magic the girl sought came from the dark arts and the dark arts were forbidden at the Academy. The only magical transformation the girl would find here went in the opposite direction; it would transform how she feels to line up with her body. And that was the end of it. If she didn’t like it, she could go back where she came from and live amongst the Muddles.
