Blog Post

I used to work at this bookstore in Texas. Being a tall, gender non-conforming transsexual woman meant many of my interactions with customers went... weird. But, out of a blur of slurs, stares, and sexualization, there's one that I've never been able to let go of. I was working at our customer service kiosk when I received a call from an older woman looking for a very specific art book. She couldn't recall its name. All she could say was that it was a collection of Audrey Beardsley's illustrations that her late husband threw away. There was little I could do with her vague description of the book's "bluish" cover, so I did some research and gathered up all that we had of Beardsley's work. I described their contents over the phone, with her frequently saying no and seeming to struggle to describe the images she was searching for. Eventually, she recalled that one of them had something to do with Salomé.

Going off of that, I skimmed through the table of contents of each book and found this:

My luck being the employee who had to describe images of naked trans women to this old lady. So, I began by saying,

"I found two illustrations of naked wom-."

"They're very provocative images aren't they?" She interjected, stopping my clumsy attempt to dance around the subject.

She then spent 30 minutes lecturing me on Audrey Beardsley and how he struggled with his sexuality and died young. She talked about how much she loved these images and how her husband got rid of them because they were "disgusting". Her voice was shaking as she thanked me and had me put the book on hold. She told me she would come pick them up on the weekend.

That weekend, I was working at the register when an old lady came up and said she had placed a book on hold earlier in the week. She didn't need to give her name. Our conversation was enough to sear her voice in my head. I brought the book over and she excitedly grabbed it and began flipping through the pages. I watched her find one of the images and then quickly close the book. She smiled and asked me to thank the "kind lady" that helped her find it. I responded, "Actually that was me. You're welcome."

I've always had a bad sense of whether people can tell I'm trans or not. Even back then, living in Texas, I didn't get misgendered very often. In some cases, people I worked with for years seemed to not know. They ma'am'd me and didn't strike me as being the type of people that were good at respecting a tranny's pronouns. However, there were many moments where, when talking to someone who assumed I was just a cis girl, I would do something that would break that illusion. What it was I never understood. Social rules and norms I never learned. I'd analyze these incidents under a microscope and always come out less sure of what went wrong.

She looked up at me, narrowed her eyes, and then got that expression cis people get when they realize you're trans. She turned white, stuttered an apology, said she changed her mind and then quickly left. I think about this exchange a lot, because with most people I don't know how they feel about my transsexuality. Not with her. She thought we were provocative, fetishistic, fantastical, secret. She waited until her husband died to take another peek at just a drawing of a girl with a dick. She must have thought I was like her when I didn't shame her for liking these illustrations over the phone.

She wasn't prepared for me to be like her secret drawings instead.

I realize that obsession with trans people is often the mark of a closeted trans person. In many ways, Audrey Beardsley's drawings and writings point to that. A part of me certainly wants to hold space for them, to be patient with people as they struggle through it. But, I only have so much patience, and there's this way that people fear and desire transsexuality that grates against what it is for me. Being trans is sacred and powerful, sure. But, it is also a fairly boring reality that I never leave.

At the end of his life Beardsley wrote,

"Jesus is our Lord and Judge.

Dear Friend,

I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings ...

By all that is holy, all obscene drawings.

Aubrey Beardsley

In my death agony."

I am fortunate that the people and art that introduced me to being trans didn't treat it like this. I'm thankful that, for all my fear, it never felt like it did for Audrey Beardsley. I have to imagine his fear was passed down to that woman. Regardless, she made me feel like an obscene, beyond fantasy monster. Impossible and provocative. Confronting me as an actual possibility so severely scared her that she went outside and waited for the driver from the senior home to come back.

Earlier that week, she told me she rarely makes this trip because of her age. Hatred is easy for me to handle. I'm used to being thorny and tough when dealing with customers. This was different. The way she looked at me like I was a ghost, the shame in her voice as she apologized, her hands shaking as she put the book down on the counter. I hated it. I hated how mad I was at her. I silently watched her leave, took my break, and went down to the basement to cry.

Before that day, I honestly held faith that I was speaking to someone who, in her old age, was finally allowing herself to come to terms with her gender or sexuality. I can't know what she wanted with trans people: to be one or to fuck one or whatever.