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@sarah-inkdragon She’s a girl. Okay. But she’s also. . . a human being. The differences between guys and girls (fictional or otherwise) aren’t big enough to turn them into two separate species. You can write human beings, obviously, because you’re comfortable writing guys. So. . . instead of focusing so much on what makes her a girl, for the moment, focus on what makes her human. The list of traits the Fledgling Artist suggested might be a good place to start, as, while we often associate being gentle or attentive to beauty with girls, they’re good traits for guys too. That’s because they’re good human traits. (Well, it’s also good when angels and animals are gentle, but I digress.)

The suggestion that her lack of family makes it harder to see her humanity, because of a lack of ties, and the possibility of losing someone she loves non-romantically, is a good one. Dorothy Sayers’ detective Lord Peter Wimsey isn’t your average guy with a quirk who walks onto the scene and solves the problem and walks off again, perfect and also cardboard with no inconvenient ties — he’s got a massively inconvenient family, and even has to investigate his own kith and kin for murder at one point. That goes far to making him human and not “a detective”. So maybe throw an inconvenient family member in and see what results from the mess.