LGBTQ+
Is Halloween a Good Day to Be Transgender?
I have mixed feelings about this holiday
Several trans people have told me that Halloween is their favorite holiday. They’ve described it as a rare time of safety to be themselves while in the closet and have fond memories as a result.
This hasn’t been my closeted experience. I don’t recall any year that I felt safe to dress in a masculine Halloween costume before coming out as a trans man. It never occurred to closeted me to use this holiday to seek out that freedom.
Why?
Well, I got the message very early on that it was physically dangerous for people to see my masculine side too clearly. It was cute until I was about seven years old. Then, I discovered that one probable response to any behavior suggesting I was a boy was violence. I learned very quickly how to act more like a girl than like the queer boy I really was.
Let’s fast forward to the story of a fresh out-of-the-closet Logan, trapped in one of those little zoom boxes on a flat computer screen during the Pandemic, like so many of us were. I was meeting many of my new coworkers for the first time, from the other side of the country. My wife and I hadn’t yet had the ability to start that journey because we had a house to sell and believed we both…