On Halloween 2004, ten days shy of my eighteenth birthday, I dressed in drag — really bad Wal-Mart last minute costume drag. Then I met up with two girls from work just to hang out in the park. This was in Tampa, and ignorant of the dangers awaiting a lonely boy in drag in that particular neck of the woods, I walked home. As I neared the entrance to the subdivision where I lived, a red pickup sped past, a beer bottle whizzing past my head and landing in the grass. I stayed as calm as I could, walked all the way home, and didn’t say a word about it.

2006 was the year I began transition. On Halloween, I got dressed up for a nightclub, and my friends and I got plastered. I don't remember it at all so it must have been great (I hope). After that, I used Halloween as a way to play into the "sexy costume" ideas, one year as Catwoman in something I'm too shy to wear now.

Lately, I've begun to have less time for Halloween because of work. Now, for the first time in a few years I'm off for Halloween, and I'm going as a nudist on strike because the holiday that once held so much significance for me just before and during my early transition has somehow snuck up on me. I suppose now that I no longer feel as though have only one day of the year to be free, it has lost its appeal beyond staying in and watching movies.

K.

I transitioned in my teens and am not public about being trans, or “stealth” as people call it. I feel a little weird that I’ve never cross-dressed on Halloween, either before or after transition. It was one of those trans woman checkboxes I never went through. I was constantly worried about people seeing a man in drag or just a guy in a guy's costume.

Halloween is the patron holiday of drag queens already, so even though young trans women also use it as a time to dress up, I feel like going out in highly-gendered costume is putting yourself on blast. Think of when cisgender people wear cross-gendered costumes: it’s the exact opposite of passing. It’s parody. Short of being read as trans while being out on a date and dressed up, nothing else sucks more.

Christopher Soto, poet