It’s a random Friday at 9 p.m. sometime during the year, probably in October. I step out of my apartment, clad in a lacy, black dress and Demonia boots that reach up to my knees, wearing the sharpest eyeliner and black lipstick combo imaginable. My nails are a sultry shade of dark red with black accents and they perfectly match my hair and jewelry. After taking my estrogen and kissing my wonderful partner on the cheek, I step out of the door to the heart of night, smiling like Mardi Gras. I get to the local bar and confidently walk to the yearly Goth Night, ready to meet up with some of my besties and dance the night away to our favorite Gothic music, only to feel a slight sense of disappointment when they end up playing Deftones (On a goth night? Really!?).
This is how I imagine myself a lot of the time whenever I think of how I want to look like and the energy I want to exude when I’m further into my transition. For now, though, a lot of those ideas are limited to my maladaptive daydreaming sessions and my mental vision boards that comfort me at my most dysphoric. Most days you’ll see me wearing a black band tee, my work in progress Battle Jacket, whichever pants (or on rare occasions, skirts) I feel most comfortable using throughout the day, a few decrepit Hot Topic necklaces layered on top of each other, and either a pair of Vans or these Nautica boots that my mom got me at Burlington. All without a single dot of makeup on my face — unless you count a rigorous skincare routine and my everpresent beard shadow as makeup. In other words: I boymode, not out of a genuine desire to do so, but more so for safety reasons. Even when I do bring myself to wear a skirt to college, I have to change in and out of it to avoid getting clocked by my mother in a transfem Superwoman turning into Clark Kent kind of way.
Because of this, I struggle a lot with the “goth girl” label; mostly because of how it feels like I’m comparing apples to oranges a lot of the time. Maybe it’s just my dysphoria talking, but I look at goth/alt women on my Instagram feed and also out and about whenever I’m at work or in college and feel a huge barrier between how they look and my presentation. And don’t get me started on my lack of makeup skills, or how I feel like the biggest newbie ever when it comes to the music. However, despite those setbacks, I still have the trans audacity to call myself “goth” — as I develop my little bat wings and fly through the sonic soundscapes of a small pool of goth bands that I know, buy as many black dresses as I can, and learn makeup in the cold air of night, all hidden away from my transphobic family. What’s interesting about the goth label for me is how much I resonated with it ever since I started transitioning. Like, I didn’t really go into the so-called “baby trans” phase where I went super cutesy and hyper-femme. Sure, I might’ve gone on a baby’s-first gender affirming JCPenny shopping spree with a friend of mine during the start of my gender journey, but in general I feel like I kinda realized I wanted to be a goth girl ever since the beginning. So, I’ll try my best to dive deep into this journey!
I was never really someone who was super deep into the goth subculture as a kid. My fondest memory and first introduction was hearing Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life” playing in the background of a random “Let’s Play” video about the final boss of the game Pokémon Colosseum (which has sadly been removed from YouTube…) and being blown away by Amy Lee’s vocals. Given that my only knowledge of music at the time was reggaeton, whatever pop music was playing on MTV, and weirdly enough drum & bass, hearing that gothic melodrama for the first time blew my 8-ish year old mind away. These moments of goth music discovery were few and far in between, however, and I would classify that discovery as a lightning in a bottle moment. In a lot of ways, my “true” introduction to anything remotely in that style were the cartoons I used to watch when I was little, and the goth girls in them that left such a lasting impact on me. I remember seeing characters like Raven from Teen Titans, Gwen from Total Drama Island, and the Hex Girls and feeling a sense of awe at how hard they were slaying whenever they appeared on screen. They’re so cool! I wish I could look like them, I remember thinking to myself back then.
If my childhood had these little goth oases, my adolescence and young adult years were a completely desolate wasteland. Most of my teens were dominated by electronic music; anything from house & EDM to vaporwave that only existed in the murkiest corners of the internet (There was a pretentious classical phase sprinkled in there too. Yeah, I know, not my proudest moment.) There was a little bit of rock in there too, but it was mostly either indie or more electronic-influenced stuff like Keane or Digitalism.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that I fully got immersed into the world of goth rock; in large part thanks to my growing interest in post-punk which touched shoulders with the melancholic sound of the genre during my late-teens/early twenties. Songs like “Continental Shelf” by Preoccupations and “NYC” by Interpol led me to the more melancholic side of the genre and really resonated with me, and for once in my life goth rock finally clicked with me.
My love for the genre truly emerged when I listened to British punk band The Horrors’ 2009 album Primary Colors during the summer of 2025. I felt that same sense of wonder that I hadn’t fully gotten with goth rock since I discovered Evanescence all those years ago. Sure, I was also starting to really get into groups like Fontaines D.C. and Black Marble at that time, but it didn’t reach those same peaks for me as this entire album did. It was something about the shoegaze guitars mixed with the macabre but oddly romantic songwriting that scratched an itch for me that I didn’t even know was there — and I couldn’t get enough of it. I heard the closing song on the album, “Sea Within A Sea,” and immediately got transported into a dark indie-sleaze infused goth club in the 2000s; and to say that it was almost an out of body experience would be an understatement. And just like that, I finally got gothic rock, and slowly but surely I fell down the rabbit hole of the genre.
It was around this time when I also figured out that something wasn’t fully sitting right when it came to my gender identity and my own sense of expression. I tried shoehorning myself into being alternative, buying my first Nine Inch Nails longsleeve at Hot Topic as well as various band tees — from Misfits to Smashing Pumpkins to Car Seat Headrest. But still, something didn’t feel authentic about how I presented myself to the world. Don’t get me wrong, it was better than the Marshalls button up tees that I used to wear before, but still everything felt… off; like I was cosplaying a type of masculine alternative fashion and not actually dressing how I wanted to. Like I mentioned in my previous article about the Evanescence concert, it was also during this time where I began to feel a sharp sense of unease whenever I would look around and see goth women out and about, that same sense of awe I felt as a child for my cartoon crushes but in a less cute, more numbing way. This unease reached its peak when I saw the band live on the 9th of May of 2024. It was a weird “came for the music, stayed for the emotional breakthrough” moment where I saw so many women and femme-presenting people freely being themselves. That awe turned to discomfort which quickly turned into what I can now call a dysphoric episode as well as a pivotal realization in my life. I didn’t want to be an alt boy, I didn’t really want to be a boy or a man at all. I wanted to be a goth woman. It just felt right to me.
Following this realization, the long and rocky process of figuring out what that inner woman looked like began. Even though I mentioned in the beginning of the article that I didn’t necessarily go through that baby-trans phase of figuring out their sense of style, I actually did sort of go through it. In a lot of ways my sense of style stayed the same for the first couple of months; this was due to a ton of reasons: mostly because it was what I had known for my entire young adulthood and also because I am still closeted. Adding to this, during that time, my knowledge of goth music and its subculture was still really limited while I was really getting into genres like grunge and hardcore music, so my style choice reflected that a lot. Generally, my style choices were giving Kurt Cobain more than Siouxsie Sioux. It felt like a really weird grey area between my pre and post transition self that in a lot of ways still lingers now, even if I feel more like a masc lesbian than anything resembling a guy now.
Over time, however, that innate curiosity for the world of goth that opened up a few years ago came back in full force. In the record store where I work we have a ton of records from a huge variety of bands (not sponsored, by the way). Some of them are icons in the goth music sphere like The Cure, Joy Division, and, in this case, Siouxsie & The Banshees! My boss had an open copy of their 1982 album A Kiss In The Dreamhouse and out of pure curiosity I gave it a spin on the store speakers. To say my mind was blown would be an understatement! From the opening song “Cascade,” the album transported me into this gloomy Alice In Wonderland-adjacent world of sound that left me hooked and wanting way more. That album would shortly become part of my daily rotation whenever I clocked in, and honestly, I wouldn’t blame any of my coworkers if they got sick of it after a while. It also led me to discover more of the Banshees’ discography, eventually leading me to picking up a vinyl copy of their 2022 compilation All Souls when we got it at the shop, which caught me up to speed with so many of their biggest hits and even some of their deep cuts!
The reason why I cherish this band as much as I do is because of how they almost single-handedly got me back into goth. I went down the rabbit hole of finding a ton of different songs and albums by gothic bands and musicians, in large part thanks to their music. From icons in the genre such as Echo & The Bunnymen, Bauhaus, and the aforementioned Joy Division, to more obscure bands like Diva Destruction and even goth metal bands like The Gathering, I could sort of say that my little baby bat wings were starting to take shape! Don’t get me wrong, my music taste is still this weird potpourri of different sounds. The day I began writing this article I started it off with sludge metal band Neurosis and am currently ending it off with the new Mitski record; regardless, I can now safely say that gothic rock is now one of my favorite genres!
In the fashion department, I had also finally taken baby steps to reach that goth girldom. During this time, I met one of my closest friends who, in a lot of ways, has been like a cool, goth older sibling figure to me, giving me makeup and style recommendations as well as getting me more into the literature side of things. Now that I’m employed, a whole world of different clothing options have opened up to me, with places like Hot Topic and online stores like Night Channels being my besties. My usual shopping list of band tees and not much else has diversified a lot more, with the occasional frilly gothic skirt, whimsical bracelet, and band patches for my ever-unfinished battle jacket becoming more prevalent. Right now, my style is still in a weird love triangle between pre-transition alt boy, goth girl, and punk rocker, but it feels more like myself than anything else at least.
And here we are now! Right now, I still consider myself a baby bat, both in the goth and gender way, one whose wings haven’t fully developed yet and is roosting in a weird in-between of punk and goth, all while discovering the amazing yet difficult world of girlhood. And yet, I love it; I’ve never felt more like myself ever, and I’m slowly starting to see that version of myself that I described in the beginning of the article, even if I’m taking baby steps to get there.