*

There’s something about feeling robust as a dwarf that makes you want more of that, and somehow I am here, in front of Mr Boules, lucky dice burning comfort in my pocket, and armed with two angry parents.

“You said to come to you if I encountered problems,” I say. And I tell him about the aggressive comments, and the hallway stares, and how I cannot breathe when I approach a bathroom and it feels like I might die.

He sighs. “This … situation’s new for everyone. Strange. Don’t you think you’re judging your peers harshly here?”

No?

My mother reaches for her courtroom-sleek portfolio. “Our child deserves to feel safe enough to pee, Mr Boules. Do you know the physical damage that can occur from restricting the bladder? Not to mention the psychological effects of being in an environment that doesn’t feel safe and supportive.” She whips out a sheet of horrifying stats on trans mental health and suicide, and slides it underneath his nose.

“Yes, but what do you suppose I do? No one’s actually stopped Scout from doing anything, have they? It’s a few stares, Mrs Corrigan.”

“You’re saying it’s all in his head?”

Boules has the decency to look ashamed, but doesn’t argue otherwise, only sighs. “We can allow you use of the staff bathroom, if you’d like? It might feel safer.”

It might. But it might also be worse: people seeing me veer off into the adult-only bathrooms. Separated. Not like them at all.

“Um.” Dad coughs faux-politely, “Have you considered educating your students? Putting up reminders that all genders are valid and hate crimes won’t be tolerated – visibly, so people know exactly where they stand…? Gender neutralizing your facilities?”

Boules blinks. “Sir?”

“When you ask my enby child to walk into that bathroom – either bathroom – you’re asking him to declare something the whole world seems set on disproving right now.” It took my dad a month of furtive glances and scouring the Internet to grasp the concept of nonbinary. I didn’t know he’d grown so fierce. “You understand why this feels unsafe, yes?”

Wow, Dad.

Boules loosens his collar, but that doesn’t stop him turning turnip-pink. “You do remember being a teenage boy, Mr Corrigan? How … silly and impulsive they can be? What happens when a vulnerable student is placed on the receiving end of this impulsiveness because we’ve not laid down clear boundaries? I’m afraid I have a school full of students to consider: every one of them deserves the same right as Scout here, to use the bathrooms without fear, and your all-in solution isn’t going to do that.”

The plan was let my parents do the talking. But, what?! “What you’re saying –” I feel sick – “is either that I’m a threat, or that ‘boys will be boys’ and you’d rather segregate them than teach them some respect. That’s gross.”

*

Nothing changed. He couldn’t – no matter how much he sympathized, he said – up and change the structure of the building. He’ll raise it with the board, and by the time I reach my dwarven age of eighty-three, perhaps they’ll act.