Featured Essay: A Trans Halloween Playlist

by mk zariel

Halloween is rapidly approaching, and with it comes a sense of haphazard openness—a sense that anyone can present how they want to, that we can celebrate the things that frighten us, that any costume or event is possible with a little DIY ethos. Of course, it doesn’t take a queer theorist to know that this sounds like something else. 

Almost every trans kid has used a Halloween costume as a source of plausible deniability for gender exploration. Almost every trans teenager has enjoyed a horror aesthetic from time to time. And almost every trans music artist…has at least one song or album that’s perfect for spooky season. In our queer art and culture, a gothic or Halloween-inspired aesthetic is often appealing, maybe because we associate it with this sense of possibility…or perhaps just because it’s a good time. Either way, I present to you my definitive Trans Halloween Mixtape.

Kim Petras - TURN OFF THE LIGHT

The undisputed queen of trans Halloween music (or any Halloween music, really), Kim Petras is a necessary inclusion in this article. However, I must admit that I wasn’t quite sold on Ms. Petras’s music for a while–I found her lyrics a little simplified, her themes overly pedestrian. Around a year ago, though, all that changed when I read fiction author and cultural critic Nic Anstett’s 2023 article “The Need For Trans Girl Trash,” in which Anstett points out the trend of moody introspection within transfeminine media and argues that fun, low-effort representation is necessary to the broader project of transfeminism. Moreover, she explicitly praises Petras’s music for its realistic, sometimes salacious nature: “I always find myself returning to Kim Petras for my hot girl walks or suffering woman runs. Even though a voice in the back of my head reminds me there are plenty of trans music artists who aren’t working with industry predators like Dr. Luke, Slut Pop was still one of my most streamed albums of 2022. I love that Petras not only releases incredibly catchy dance pop, but that so much of it is unabashedly sexual and risqué.” Maybe for this reason, I can’t help but find Petras’s music perfect for Halloween. We love Kim Petras for the reasons we love cheaply made horror flicks–her music is easy to understand, invokes spooky aesthetics without inducing genuine fear, and most of all, brings fun and levity to the trans experience at a time when it’s often (as Anstett mentions) framed as a challenging and upsetting way to move through the world.

Dazey And The Scouts - Maggot

When it comes to this album’s seasonal relevance, the title song’s lyrics tell you all you need to know: “What if I’m nothing but a cardiac-arresting sweetheart / A half run-over cat left in the street / And you’re the maggot craving / Rotten flesh left outside in the heat?” The whole project goes on in roughly this spirit, blending gothic imagery with confessional messages about the complexity of queer desire. Lea Jaffe and Brendan Wedl’s vocals are predictably haunting (a strength carried over into both artists’ solo projects). Most importantly, this album carries the slow burn that can often be the most unsettling. While TURN OFF THE LIGHT has the easy delight of a trashy horror flick, Maggot is more like one of Jane Schoenbrun’s or Ari Aster’s more cerebral films, letting its darkly romantic lyrics slowly take on a foreboding tone rather than reaching for cheap thrills. While it tends NSFW at times (maybe don’t listen to “Nice Nice” if you don’t want to hear graphic details about physically intimate desires), Maggot is an emotionally powerful album that masterfully wields its Halloweeny aesthetic while being somewhat perfect for every time of year.

Truly all of Um Jennifer’s music

Not an album, but this bears mentioning anyway. Um Jennifer, a self-described “trans slut rock band,” bases their name and many of their lyrics on Jennifer, their vengeful yet endearing goddess who is heavily implied to be trans. With lyrics such as “All wrapped up in her world / She was my glamour girl / Painted lips, her painted point of view / The only thing that’s true / Aw, her endless eyes / Yeah, it’s no surprise” on “Glamour Girl,” and “Hey, Jenny girl, uh, last night I woke up in a cold sweat and I swore I saw a human like figure standing in the doorway of my room. Do- you can say hi, you know? [..] Hi, Jen-Jen, your hurricane forced winds in huge chasms of fire, ooh, so feminine!” on “Jennifer Journals,” the band effortlessly bridges paranormal horror with T4T melodrama. Similar to Maggot, Um Jennifer’s discography leans toward vaguely grunge-influenced rock, quiet enough to be forboring and loud enough to be queer as hell. Between lyrically sparse bangers about gender-affirming care (“Went On T”) and anthems against TERF ideology (“Girl Class”), all full of casual allusions to horror, Um Jennifer is perfect for both the mosh pit and the haunted house.

Kimya Dawson - My Cute Fiend Sweet Princess

While surreal enough to help set the mood on Halloween, this Kimya Dawson album is genuinely just a soundtrack to the autumn season. Mainly acoustic and prioritizing a cozy, laid-back energy, My Cute Fiend Sweet Princess is full of the kind of queercore that one can vibe to when one is too tired to be listening to (for example) TURN OFF THE LIGHT.  “Will You Be Me?,” one standout on the album, is almost entirely abstract and open to interpretation, with lyrics such as “There’s a scary topiary to the left of the pool / The trail to the right goes back to middle school / I’m trying to read what the flashing red letters say / They say lowest common destiny and so I run away / ’cause I can’t make the grade when I’m on display.” Dawson, an anarchist folk-punk artist who came out as nonbinary and began using she/they pronouns in late 2019, broadly tends toward autumnal and almost quiet imagery in their lyrics, aiming to evoke a feeling of comfort; of all their work, this album is by far their most surreal, featuring dreamlike imagery without passing it off as humorous and whimsical (as in most songs on Dawson’s prior album Remember That I Love You). Much like Um Jennifer’s work, My Cute Fiend Sweet Princess embraces the weird, just sincere enough to feel transformative.

The Doubleclicks - The Book Was Better

For all its horror aesthetics, Halloween is truly just about rocking a cosplay from your favorite fandom, preferably one for a character that gives you gender envy. (Do any other transmascs default to dressing as various Buffy characters? Nope? Just me?) With vocals by the Doubleclicks’ transmasc frontman Laser Malena-Webber, this album embraces that fact wholeheartedly. With one song in obvious tribute (“Nobody Gets It,” a ballad for a character whose Halloween costume is much more obscure than those of their friends) and many others coded with subtle references to fandom, this album is fundamentally a celebration of subculture, with nerd culture and queer spaces alike recognized as radically inclusive. The Book Is Better is an album about belonging, about laughing at one’s own foibles, about gender euphoria, about who we can be when we dare to try new identities, even if just for a night or an eternity. This experimental spirit, while sometimes hyperspecific (does anyone actually get every reference on a Doubleclicks album? if so, that person’s impressively nerdy and I kind of want to meet them), somewhat encapsulates the type of self-reliant mindset that trans people need to survive under fascism–along with the fun and joy of TURN OFF THE LIGHT, the emotional heart of Maggot, the creative spirituality of Um Jennifer, and the deeply felt whimsy of My Cute Fiend Sweet Princess. So this Halloween, let’s remember that sometimes a little generative fear, and a lot of community, is precisely what we need.

mk zariel {it/its + masc terms} is a transmasculine neuroqueer theater artist, Best Of The Net and Monarch Award nominated poet, movement journalist, and BashBack aligned anarchist translocally rooted in the Great Lakes region. the author of VOIDGAZING (2026, Whittle Micropress) and BOY APPARITION (2025, Vinegar Press), it creates conflictual spaces for trans survival and queer desire—spaces of insurgent genders, mutual aid beyond the nonprofit gaze, and the kind of care that negates (and negation that provides care). BashBack! remains close to its heart, as do anarchonihilism/egoism, experimental theater, and the defiant tenderness of queer collectivity. mk’s organizing is often underground, but its poetics and podcast crackle with the same unruly energy: community as generative+atemporal destruction, poetry as direct action. Oh, and according to anarchistnews.org—“zariel quotes the Principia Discordia, which is kind of funny” and “what is explicitly said about chaos is…fine?”.

Its writing has appeared in Querencia Press, Akpata, J Journal, Witches Magazine, Fifth Estate, ANMLY, OurLives Wisconsin, Library Of Eris, Oyster River Pages, and Seattle Journal of Social Justice, among many others. It contributes columns to Asymptote and the Anarchist Review of Books, its mixed media work is featured through Open Sorcery, and it authors the advice column DEBATE ME BRO and hosts the podcast THE CHILD AND ITS ENEMIES. it has also collaborated with Urban Ganges on a line of themed reed diffusers. mk is the author of eleven self-published zine projects, and performs regularly at anarchist gatherings, zine fests, and queer liberation events. You can find its offerings, commissions, and chaotic love letters to the world at mkzariel.carrd.co.