The first Halloween costume the 10-year-old remembers is a pink and purple fairy dress with detachable wings. He was obsessed with those wings, his mother says, wearing them for weeks after the holiday.
In the years since, he has gone as a magical Muppet from Sesame Street, Daisy Ridley’s Rey from Star Wars and the Grim Reaper.
This Halloween, the first since coming out to his family as transgender, he wanted to go as Garnet, a female-presenting alien from the animated TV series “Steven Universe.” Garnet, who has struck a chord with some trans and non-binary viewers, is a fusion of two “gems” sharing one holographic body.
“In the beginning it was two different people, right? A Ruby Guard and a Sapphire Princess,” the boy explained the other day at a coffee shop near his home in Bethesda. “The Ruby Guard protects the Sapphire Princess. She gets in trouble, and the Ruby Guard saves her, and then — then they merge together to make Garnet.”
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He paused, pulling his knees closer to him.
“I think that’s kind of cool.”
For children with gender dysphoria — a mismatch between gender identity and the sex on their birth certificate — or who are interested in exploring different gender expressions, Halloween can have special significance, said Darren Vance, executive director of the nonprofit Rainbow Families and the father of a non-binary teen.
“It’s that once-a-year opportunity where people get free license to push the boundaries of identity,” Vance said. “For kids who are curious, just the spirit of Halloween, the costuming aspect, provides a perfect opportunity to do that.”
The Bethesda boy, whose parents asked that his name be withheld to protect his privacy, passed a piece of paper to his mother one evening this August. On it, he’d written four words that he says he had already known to be true for several months: “I am a boy.”
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Issues of gender have shaped the family’s conversations this Halloween, said his mother, who agreed to be identified by her first name, Jenny. But the 10-year-old never explicitly raised it as a consideration.
“He identifies as male, but that’s a very tiny piece of himself,” Jenny said of her son, whose love for Mario Kart is matched by a die-hard devotion to RuPaul’s Drag Race. “He’s 10. He loves dressing up as whatever he wants.”
Turning to her child, she reminded him of last Halloween. “You were like a zombie queen, zombie princess, right?”
“Eh,” he replied, shrugging. “I think I was just a dead zombie that wore a dress,”
Weeks before this Halloween, Jenny and her son tried to create a Garnet costume but struggled to get it exactly right. They bought a wig to mimic the character’s rectangular hairdo and a pair of star-shaped glasses. But repeated attempts to transform a T-shirt to resemble Garnet’s pink body suit fell apart.
Admitting defeat, they headed to Party City. If Garnet was not an option, the 10-year-old wanted an inflatable costume — the kind he had seen on viral YouTube videos and that “can do stuff where it’s like, it can make it look like something that’s not real.”
He debuted his inflatable — and decidedly non-gendered — T-Rex costume this past Saturday, at a Rainbow Families Halloween party that drew two other blowup dinosaurs as well.
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The moment he tottered into the gymnasium at Alexandria’s Browne Academy, the boy was swarmed by kids reaching for the costume’s tail and oversize head.
Some of the young partygoers that night were gay or non-binary, but most had parents who were LGBTQ. In recent years, Vance said, the nonprofit has welcomed a growing number of cisgender, heterosexual parents who have LGBTQ children, and like Jenny, want to expose them to different family structures.
The boy ran and bounced through the gymnasium, trailed by a shrieking group of princesses, ghosts and zombies. Two mothers dressed as dwarves to complement their daughter’s Snow White. A pair of dads were Toy Story’s Buzz and Woody. Gender roles seemed far less important than having fun.
Standing off to the side, Jenny chatted with other parents, one eye on her little T-Rex. The past few months have not been easy for him, she said. He started at a D.C. private school this fall after being bullied at the public school he used to attend. His struggles with depression and anxiety have worsened in recent weeks, prompting a leave of absence from school that his parents hope will be temporary.
Like many other parents of trans kids, Jenny and her husband say they are trying to affirm their son’s identity with the right clothes and pronouns, while processing the realities of LGBTQ discrimination. They read news accounts of violence against trans people with deepened anxiety, paying especially close attention to the recent assaults on trans women in the Washington area. They want their son to grow up clear-eyed and resilient, Jenny said. But above all, they want him to be happy.
Midway through Saturday’s party, as Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” came on through the sound system, the 10-year-old masquerading as a dinosaur grew restless. He zipped open the cumbersome Polyester suit and stepped out.
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He would don it again on Thursday, the actual night of Halloween, but for now, he had other plans.
The chorus to Jackson’s Halloween classic soared. Jenny walked toward the front of the room, watching her son perform cartwheels and backbends with a friend, dressed just as himself. Holding onto his crumpled, deflated costume, she smiled.
“I think,” she said, “he wanted to be a little freer.”
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