Sirona Ryan is Not Canonically Transgender

The Hogwarts Legacy NPC only has one line of dialogue suggesting she might possibly be trans.

by Evan Urquhart

like the platform between 9 and 10, Sirona Ryan is neither trans nor cis

The developers of Hogwarts Legacy reportedly included Sirona Ryan as a minor token NPC to “pivot the conversation” and de-fang any criticism of the game’s connection to noted transphobe J. K. Rowling.

screenshot from Pink News

Multiple news articles have declared Sirona Ryan is a transgender woman, based on a single line of dialogue where the character says it took her classmates “a second to realize I was actually a witch, not a wizard.” Critics in the LGBTQ+ community have focused on Ryan’s cringeworthy name for having the syllable “sir” in the first name follwed by a male first name as a last name, which is Rowling-esque in its tonedeafness to be sure.

The line about having classmates who believed Sirona was a wizard certainly hints at the possibility of transness, and intentionally so. But it could also be interpreted in other ways, for instance the character could be a cisgender witch who was bullied by classmates for having a masculine appearance. So is the character even canonically transgender? That does not seem to be something the developers are willing to say.

The developers of Hogwarts Legacy have largely been avoiding speaking to the press about the controversy concerning their game. The one outlet that got them to comment is gaming website IGN. IGN asked multiple questions about Sirona Ryan, none of which resulted in a clear statement that the character is transgender. Here’s a screenshot to give a flavor of the evasive language used:

screenshot from IGN

These developers don’t deserve even the minimal credit of saying they included a transgender character as a sop to critics of Rowling’s transphobia. Sirona Ryan is an ambigious character who has never been confirmed to be transgender either within the game or by the game’s creative team.