My name is Mikaela Moody. I’m visibly disfigured by a genetic condition called Crouzon’s syndrome. I’m 27, a white British trans woman, a musician, and a author (totally on Twitter).

Autumn is one in all my favourite times of 12 months – mostly due to the lead-up to Christmas, but Halloween is neat, too. I just like the fun side of Halloween (I’m not an enormous fan of being scared!); I like ‘spoopy’ Halloween. The proliferation of green, purple and orange is charming, and I benefit from the kitsch, and the familial atmosphere of children in costumes and pumpkin patches.

As a Disfigured person, the contemporary, popular type of Halloween doesn’t really like me back. Or reasonably, it likes me and my disfigured, disabled, neurodivergent friends in a creepy way. Halloween uses us. Whether gently spooky or outright terrifying, Halloween so often shuts out disfigured, disabled, and neurodivergent people because history, fairy tales and prejudice say that we’re inherently scary.

We are the villainous subjects of movies and costumes, and our disfigurements, disabilities and divergences are shown as weird at best, or at worst as punishments, to deliver an ethical message to the audience.

“Representation in entertainment and factual media has consequences”

Examples include Freddy Krueger, the Phantom of the Opera, and any variety of other characters whose storytellers deem them worthy of the ugly stick due to a deficiency in goodness. Disfigurement becomes a dressing up – an issue not restricted to Halloween – and other than the vilification of our (irl morally-neutral) conditions, this stings because disfigured individuals are almost never chosen to represent ourselves in visual media, even on the occasion that we get to be heroes. See Mask. See last 12 months’s Wonder.

There are exceptions, like Under the Skin, which features Adam Pearson representing his own condition as an individual with neurofibromatosis, with no villainous or tragic angle to his character. Unfortunately, a) this can be a film I still have not seen because it’s horror, and b) such representation is as thin on the bottom as unwrapped sweets on November 1st.

And representation in entertainment and factual media has consequences, resembling those felt by South Carolina cancer survivor Kirby Evans, whose facial scarring drew the disfiguremisic ire of a neighborhood proprietor, resulting in his dismissal from the premises, and a subsequent GoFundMe in Evans’ support.

“As a Disfigured person, I needed a word like ‘disfiguremisia’ to explain what happens to people like me, socially and institutionally”

‘Disfiguremisia’ is the term I got here up with to explain the erasure of, and prejudice against, disfigured (or visibly different) people, with ‘disfiguremisic’ its adjective form.

There’s been a number of discussion inside the Disabled Twitter community concerning the continuing efficacy of the suffix ‘phobia’ to explain bigoted views, on condition that individuals with legitimate phobias can get caught within the crossfire. Using ‘misia’ as a suffix got here out of that, and I made a decision to compound it with ‘disfigure’. My personal pronunciation is ‘dis-fig-uh-ruh-mis-ia’, which I also think is a reasonably elegant option to describe a fairly ugly thing – if you happen to’ll excuse a Disfigured lady her pun.

Chosen with agency and never on the behest of a privileged peer (or overseer), labels allow marginalised people to precise the various ways we’re separate and are separated from individuals who have more institutional privilege, across any and all axes. As a Disfigured person, I needed a word like ‘disfiguremisia’ to explain what happens to people like me, socially and institutionally. It empowers me, just as selecting to own ‘Disfigured’ (and to capitalise it, because it’s an integral a part of me) does.

With no word like this, prejudice against disfigured people is lumped in with ableism (often accurately), or more cumbersome terms like appearance shaming, or bullying, which don’t describe the breadth of what I intend ‘disfiguremisia’ to mean.

“I’m Disfigured, and I select the title ‘Princess’ on Twitter since it’s a pleasant, fun, harmless option to claim some traditional femininity”

It’s particularly relevant this time of 12 months, and I decide to reflect that on Twitter. I’ve used the title ‘Disfigured Princess’ for over a 12 months now, referencing my identities as a Disfigured person and a trans woman, and (vitally) as someone who’s each at the identical time, and skim as masculine attributable to conceptions about each. I’m Disfigured, and I select the title ‘Princess’ on Twitter since it’s a pleasant, fun, harmless option to claim some traditional femininity.

This Halloween, following time-honoured Twitter tradition, I’ve added ‘Horrifically’, to reclaim a label oft-used in descriptions and synopses of horror and thriller movies which feature a personality tragically (or as punishment) disfigured. Once I discuss Disfigurement on Twitter, it’s generally about how entertainment media reinforces disfiguremisic tropes, but it surely’s value stating that ‘horrifically disfigured’ just isn’t an outline doled out to fictional characters only. Claiming it as a Twitter Halloween name is a fun, tongue-in-cheek option to take back something which has done harm.

And plenty of of us disfigured people, disabled people, neurodivergent people, would like to have the identical access to Halloween as everyone else. We would like the spooky stuff, and we do not see why we have to be harmed institutionally for it to be effective. So if you tuck yourself in for a slasher marathon, or placed on that ogre mask to greet trick-or-treaters, take a minute to think about what you might be doing to make October a month of secure, inclusive spooks for everybody.