Ah, the only internationally recognized holiday of the crossdressing world is upon us again, & I had an interesting experience shopping for Halloween costumes & party decorations with Betty.
We were looking around at the mass-produced costumes, me mostly cursing about the oversexed women’s and girl’s costumes (the girls’ costumes show more skin than the ones for adult men, for crying out loud) and Betty thought maybe she’d figure out a costume around an interesting wig. But: I found myself getting uncomfortable when she started trying them on. It was just too much of the past, & started messing with my sense of her gender. It was a Big Deal when she finally got to grow her hair long enough, and have it styled unisex/feminine, that the wigs brought me right back to when she couldn’t do that and had to have men’s cuts (since she was a leading man onstage) and so had to wear wigs in order to go out “en femme.”
So no wigs for us, but we did use spray-on black hair dye (so she could be Wednesday Addams & I could be Frida Kahlo, unibrow & all).
Halloween is still far & above our favorite holiday, but it’s definitely taken on new meanings in this post-trans life of ours. My feminism is more tweaked when she wants to wear short skirts & fetishy shoes because I expect her to say no to all this bullshit objectification of women — and that’s in addition to the absolute bullshit of this culture agreeing that it’s okay for women to be sexual once a year (& once a year only).
So what about you? Has Halloween changed for you in the context of your trans identity/journey? I’d love to hear.
Yeah, for I minute I wanted to dress like a man it passed, though.
I never dressed en femme for Halloween for the same reason I never saw “Rocky Horror.” Doing so would have been a “clear admission of GUILT.” It’s just too bad I wasn’t paranoid, or anything…
I’ve been ambivalent about Halloween since I was small;even then I knew I had something to hide; I never wanted to wear makeup because I was afraid people would find out *my terrible secret*.
When I ended up running a shop for CD’s, Halloween became the equivalent of Christmas/Black Friday for the retail biz before Xmas;I just remember closing the shop at 11pm after doing the last makeover;Halloween is of course “Amateur Night” for all those closeted CD’s out there.
Had nowhere to really go this year and didn’t wear a costume; being a boy five or six days a week is enough I guess.
Used to be I could just wear a skirt and call it a costume. Now I have to really come up with something different. Well, I can do the “french maid”, “naughty nurse”, you know, something that sexualizes my femininity. Something I wish I could have done when I was 22 and prettier. This year I got out the french maid dress I have from 6 or 7 years ago, added a punky neon pink wig and was pronounced a hottie by several drunken men and one not drunk female friend, so it wasn’t a total loss.