Guest Post by Alma. Alma is a transgender stay-at-home mom, still exploring what being a woman means to her.

Halloween, throughout my life, has been my most hated holiday. Every year involved hastily thrown together costumes that could be done with what clothes we already had, watching movies that were entirely too scary and overwhelming for my young, autism spectrum mind, not understanding why so many people loved a holiday to try and be as scary and gross as they could for the sake of showing off to others.

But this year, something changed. This year I began my transition to present my female self to the world, unapologetic and unreserved. The holiday approached with the coming fall as usual, and my mind unexpectedly offered the simple thought, “You can dress how you’ve always wanted to.”

So I set to thinking of how I could possibly dress. Inexplicably, my mind was prepared with a list, one that had built in my subconscious for decades of longing and shutting up into my steamer trunk of impossibilities, a list of costumes I desperately wanted to try. Not just try, to show off!

They crossed all sorts of genres, and unsurprisingly consisted of skirts of various lengths. From a baseball player from the women’s All-American League depicted in A League of Her Own, to a cute maid outfit, to a Greek muse, this year I settled on a simple costume from one of my favourite Disney movies growing up, Belle, from Beauty and the Beast.