Born to a muggle family on a council estate, Quinn now lives with family between York and Sheffield in South Yorkshire: a new and exciting situation as Sheffield runs straight to London's St Pancras where their schooling awaits.

Born just as the leaves started to turn to James and Elizabeth Smith; Quinn spent much of their young life trying to organise chaos, doing their homework between shreddies, jam-pots and overdraft letters and dreaming about one day being an astronaut, or a doctor. Perhaps even a scientist. Though lower-class, Quinn's family has always been very loving and supportive--if a little bit stressed from finances.

In the last year, Quinn built up to courage and came out as non-binary to their parents, and though they initially didn't understand their daughter's choice in becoming more androgynous, they've eventually come to embrace it and allow the journey to play out.

Initially, the uncertainty of this new thing caused a little knot of tension in the family, Quinn's mother remarked that children aren't colouring books, you can't colour them in with your favourite colour. She asked only that Quinn take their time with the journey to make sure it's fully what they want.

When it rains, it pours. Coming out as non-binary suddenly seemed much simpler and easier for Betty and James to process than the news their child was magical--let alone the peculiar person that brought this news, with their strange vibrant clothes and baffling fascination with the mundane world. ('Is this the cross-box three-sixty? Marvellous, just marvellous.')

Quinn thought they'd stitched fate's red thread very neatly into a sensible and coherent tapestry--for the wizarding world to raze an unpicking tool through it completely knocked them off-kilter; leaving them dazed and confused without an anchor or mast to cling to.

Understand, they meticulously measured and tacked every mundane aspiration out in the muggle-world--a life plan from cradle to grave-- wrote Oxford or Cambridge into the stars a hundred times over to make it an eventual reality; so imagine their utter surprise when Hogwarts drew potluck instead and offered a welcoming, wizened hand into a world they never dared dream.

And they said yes.



When they were younger, Quinn's father went to all-out-shoe-hitting-the-wall-war with a common house-spider; the innocuous, harmless kind that just so happen to be in the very wrong place at the very wrong time. This bulletproof spider is now something of an inside family joke because whenever he'd throw something at the spider to crush it, the object would seem to glance away, leaving the spider unharmed for the best part of a minute, thankfully it then scuttled away to safety.