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“Your pin is pretty.”
Eri’s statement cut through the quiet of the classroom and about gave Izuku a heart attack when he realized what she said. She was talking about the trans pride pin on his book bag.
Aizawa had left her with him for the moment to get something from another room. For the past few minutes, she had just been sitting at the desk beside him, quietly playing with a stuffed toy while he studied, so nothing had really prompted this.
Regardless, he tried to calm down and brush it off. Maybe she just liked the way it looked?
“Uh, thanks. I like it too.” He quickly said.
Another moment of silence before she piped up again.
“What does it mean?”
Izuku’s heart rate sped up again. “Uh, what do you mean?”
“Do the colors mean anything? Sometimes I see those colors together on some things and I dunno if it means anything. Like the other day, I saw them on this big flag outside.”
He may have been maintaining a mostly straight face, but on the inside, Midoriya was freaking out. To be honest, this was one of his worst fears; he wasn’t sure how to explain this so that kids could understand, he thought they wouldn’t be able to. He supposed having a bunch of “The Cis TM”, as his other trans classmates would call it, tell you that kind of engrains the idea into your head.
But regardless, it couldn’t hurt to try, right? If all else fails, he could ask Aizawa to explain it better to her, he was trans too and probably could explain it better than him.
“Well, uh, when you see these colors striped like this...in this order...it’s uh...”
He took a deep breath, trying to figure out how to put this.
“Sometimes when someone is born, they’re not happy with the gender they are, they’re not happy with being a boy or a girl, so they change that. These colors are a symbol for those people. It’s something that says they’re proud to be that way.”
Eri cocked her head to the side, crinkling her eyebrows. “What does that mean?”
Izuku was wringing his hands now. “Like someone could be born a girl and be a boy later, or someone could be born a boy and be a girl later, or they could be born as either a boy or a girl and end up being neither or both—if that’s the case, you usually call them ‘they’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘she’, though there are other pronouns people use. I can teach you those if you want, or maybe Aizawa can.”
Eri sat there, silent and looking at him. Izuku’s heart sank. Why did he think he’d be able to explain this well?
“I’m sorry, that probably doesn’t make any sense, I didn’t mean—“
“So what are you, Izuku?”
He paused before responding, “I’m a boy.”
“And you were born a girl?”
He bit his lip. He really didn’t like admitting it. “Yeah.”
She sat there, contemplating momentarily, before looking at him again. “Are you happy now?”
Izuku smiled, half at her and half to himself. “Very happy.”
She paused before smiling at him. “Ok.” And with that, she returned to playing with her stuffed toy.
Izuku had to stop himself from audibly sighing with relief. He really didn’t think he’d be able to explain this well to a kid, and he was even afraid she would think it was weird, but she’d gotten everything he’d said and wasn’t even really batting an eye at it. Seeing someone Eri’s age understand being trans when there were adults that refused to honestly gave him hope for the future.
So he sat there, continuing to work and feeling a little happier than he usually did.
Later that day, Aizawa was walking with Eri through the city back to their house when she abruptly stopped and pointed above the two of them.
“Look Aizawa! That billboard looks just like Izuku’s pin!”
He looked up to see a billboard covered with pink, blue and white, the exact shade too.
He smiled and let out a soft chuckle. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”