Freya-Onions-report

–a story of obsession, snapchat and liberation

This one is about Bailey, a person who I have, to some extent, been avoiding thus far on this blog. So far she’s mainly come up as one of the many women I felt I needed my personality to revolve around throughout my teens, a person who minimised my own dysphoria.

I’ve also discussed the long poem I wrote throughout my first two years at university, Sunset Sex with Bailey Jay (2020), finished in lockdown, which I had originally intended as a project that would encapsulate and express why Bailey had seemed to mean everything to me in my late teens, and why she seemed to have so much to do with the way I imagined my future.

Even when talking with close friends, I often feel like I’m not adequately expressing just how significant Bailey was as a figure in my life during those crucial years of subject formation. 

First of all: who is Bailey? Bailey is an American trans woman, who lives in Florida, but was originally from Richmond, Virginia, and was born in 1988, making her now 35 years old. Bailey Jay is her public name, and in this blog I’m refraining from using her real name because I don’t know if it’s public. She’s actually pretty famous- just google her and you’ll see. Most widely known for her porn, she is also a podcaster, presenter, and internet personality. She is also the first out trans person I ever knew personally. 

Now, I want to recount the history of how I first came across Bailey, how I befriended her, and how she became one of the biggest influences in my life. 

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So, I first came across Bailey in the winter of 2018- my guess is around January or February 2018, when I was 18 and in my final year of A-Levels. Perhaps surprisingly, I’d never really been into trans porn, or, as I believe it was still then called, even on the most mainstream websites, shemale porn. I don’t remember specifically which video I saw, or how I came across it, but I do remember thinking that Bailey was one of the most beautiful people I’d ever seen. 

Then, either that very same day, or perhaps later that week, I googled her name and found her twitter profile, which I scrolled through in earnest. I sat there, on my bed, reading all of her tweets, becoming more obsessed with her the more I read. She was so funny, and unique, and so beautiful: I was immediately smitten with her.

Where before transsexuality was something that I was aware of, I had never seen a trans person have a voice before. I had never seen a transsexual be funny, or weird, or interesting. I had only seen them as victims or objects of ridicule, or activists. I lay on my bed in my childhood bedroom and it felt like my world was being opened. 

From then on, Bailey became a kind of secret leisure activity for me. While I wouldn’t mention a word of my obsession at school, when I got home I would consume every piece of non-pornographic content she produced- particularly on youtube and twitter. 

When I searched her on youtube, I found videos of her on various talk shows, her own podcast, and various little standalone videos she had filmed for various organisations. 

While I had found her in the context of porn, almost immediately, I became only interested in the non-pornographic content she produced. This is not to say that I mentally blocked out the realities of her career- if anything, in my mind it only added to her aura of sexual freedom.

I was in love with her transness, her confidence, and her femininity. I was smitten: at times it literally felt like I had heart eyes when I watched her talk. Even when I wasn’t consuming her content, her presence seemed to take up more and more of my psyche and the year moved on from winter through to the spring of 2018 and my A-Level finals. 

Myself and my childhood friend, Glen, wrote a poem in early 2019 about the previous year. To everyone, I think, 2018 seemed like an enormous thing in our lives. I will quote from this poem, named Zeitgeist, throughout the next section. 

As my fascination with Bailey grew, I began to research more and more about trans identity, seeing this as a logical extension of my interest in Bailey. In amongst my copious reading, I learned about Blanchard’s pseudoscientific typology of transsexuality, which was later adopted by Michael J Bailey in his 2001 book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, and how the trans community hated it. For an 18yr old cis guy, I sure did know a lot about the difference between hsts and agps. 

It was a cold winter, and a very important time for me academically. It was also the winter that I received my offer from Magdalene College, Cambridge, having been interviewed in December 2017. While this time period felt almost suffocatingly intense, it also felt like my world was opening up, like I was working towards a distinct future. 

I also learned about transness from the various videos starring Bailey on the internet. Like one 20 minute long video she uploaded for We Happy Trans, where she answered questions about her own life and trans identity, which she answered with an intense earnestness and sensitivity. Click the link to watch the video if you want get the idea. 

I watched little clips of her lazing around her pool in Florida with european-sounding music playing in the background. She wore huge sunglasses, and I thought she was the most amazing person in the world. 

In one, the music playing in the background was Aguas de Marco by Elis Regina, a beautiful song written in Portuguese. I started listening to the song in my free time, trying to capture some of the joy I imagined Bailey felt just in being herself. Around this time, probably still in winter of 2018, I introduced the song to my friends at sixth form, which they were all impressed by.

We started playing the song pretty regularly when we were hanging around school, but only I knew where it came from, only I knew how much it really meant to me. 

Weeks went by, Bailey illuminating many of the hours I spent alone. In these moments, everything felt just right, like it was exactly right at just the right time. I saw her as unimaginably powerful and beautiful, all the more so because her beauty and femininity had had to be by choice. I tried to imagine her life in in her 20s in New York, and tried to picture how amazing, how liberating it must have felt to even have a tiny piece of that. 

Work finished and coursework sent off in handfuls.
Now the real work begins, the garden scattered with shafts
of green light.

She wasn’t a victim: she exuded an endearing American confidence in her identity. As the months wore on, I started looking wider for content from Bailey. I listened to hours and hours of her podcast, The Bailey Jay Show, which she recorded in her home with her husband. I listened to her one song on Spotify from 2014, You’re Getting Lucky Tonight, and felt just totally in awe of her, even if I felt the song was a little cringy. 

From April/ May, it was a period of revision for my upcoming exams. I remember I was revising in the warm garden in the sun, reading lines again and again to memorise them. The Arctic Monkey’s Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino came out around then, and I listened to ‘Star Treatment’, feeling more and more excited about starting university. 

We revise fluidly along the chain of hot days. 
June, ‘oh boys the courthouse has been demolished,
and though I’ve never mentioned it before I was
very fond of that old haunt.’ A picture of tumbling
salmon-brown rubble, jagged hunks of brick ‘The façade
will appear to the casual viewer exactly as it was before.’
The windows wrenched open and the sound of churchbells
all day. Trains at night. Soleros on swing-sets and curtains
caught up in the breeze, caterpillars scaling fresh stems. 

All this time, I was aware of how much my life would change, but I saw it only in the most hopeful terms. While school increasingly seemed to feel like the roadblock to our collective liberation and success, a dampener on our brains and our capacity to think, the promise of a bright summer seemed to only grow bigger. 

then a strange series of pictures of Shifnal
at night. Views from the station bridge, streetlights flaring
up like the moon, light scattered across the floor of the co-op
car park, as if cast through warm leaves. 

When I finished my exams in June I had a wait a week or so before my other friends finished as they were doing very different A-Level subjects to me. We had some amazing piss-ups in my garden with my old friends. 

Chiaroscuro of afternoon sun on the grass. Later, the tiny moon
in a pool of pastel blue, sunset pictures, then it’s dark and among
deckchairs a whistling pot. 

When they had finished exams, my friends and I went on a post-A-Level holiday to Bologna with some inter-railing around Italy thrown in. I had a fantastic time on this holiday, and throughout felt vividly as if my whole life was ahead of me- as though anything could happen when I started uni in September. 

It was a brilliant holiday- definitely one of my favourite I’ve ever been on. Perhaps the most significant thing for me that happened was in Riomaggiore, a town on the cinque terre. Me and some of my closest friends, Glen and Charlie, sat on a rocky outcrop overlooking the sea as the sun went down. We were sipping those delicious pre-mixed bottles of Aperol spritz. On this euphoric evening, with my new life at uni on the horizon, I decided to tell my friends about Bailey, and it felt liberating.

We’d been drinking on the rocks by the sea:
Honeymoon-light, the sea very much in motion,
Pissing onto the rocks down crevices also.
Johnny clambered off round the cove, a dot
in the distance. We watch and hope he doesn’t ‘fall an
crack his head on those beautiful rocks.’ An hour
of talk and Aperols passes fine anyway. 

I didn’t tell the whole truth: I presented my attraction to Bailey as sexual and romantic, dodging the reality of what it was. Regardless it felt like a weight had been lifted, a secret unlocked: after 8 months of hiding the one person who had animated my days I had finally spoken her name aloud. I felt so happy after telling them about her, and how amazing I thought she was. We continued drinking until the sun went down, and the second half of the holiday was as fun as the first. 

[Freya] blossoms under the breezy heat of the
sea air, enlightening the boys of Bailey,
[her] saviour. ‘Let’s have a look at her’ says Chaz.
‘Like that.’ Ah, finally, The Great Mother, The Archetype.

We got home, and had many more amazing days together before our lives were to change forever and we left our home town.

During August of 2018, I came up with the initial concept for Sunset Sex with Bailey Jay. Throughout the rest of this post, quotations will be from this unless otherwise stated. Since telling the others about Bailey in June, I had taken every opportunity to mention her and how much I knew about her. 

One night, Glen hosted a party that was attended by the wider Sixth Form group- people who we were friendly with but weren’t our closest friends.

(…) 2nd September 
Glen hosts again- major drinking and all the old
Sixth Form pals converge. Lines of salt littered
on the table to cause a stir. Multiple bottles
of wine each: an assembly forms as [Freya] explains
[her] flourishing sickening love for Bailey.(Zeitgeist)

By mid September, most of my friends had already left for uni, though my term didn’t start until the 29th, leaving me in limbo. Finished with school, finished with the summer, but not quite yet moving on.

At the same time, by this point it almost felt imperative that I speak to Bailey. I felt sick with longing. 

She had come to represent a lot more than just herself: now she was also, dramatically, the key to my liberation. But I knew that I needed to speak to her to find out what that would look like. So, I paid the £19 pounds to become her friend for one month on Snapchat, thinking that as long as I could have one good conversation with her, I could move on.

I sat on the swings in the ‘big park’ from my childhood with two of my friends from secondary school: Dave and Ed, who by now knew all about my obsession with Bailey. I pressed subscribe. I sent her a message, and, the next day, on Monday the 17th of September, she replied. I was at a piss up at Dave’s house, which was on one of the new estates on the outskirts of our town. 

We chatted, and Bailey quickly took a shine to me because, unlike the horny cis men who made up the rest of her fan base on the platform, I was uninterested in asking pervy questions or sexting. In fact, our first topic of conversation was Allen Ginsberg.

She replied genially, saying that she had been a ‘lowkey beatnik’ all her life. She spoke intelligently and fluently on the poetry she liked (I brought the topic up because not only was I crazy about poetry at the time but I had the feeling that it was her sort of thing). She told me about how Anne Sexton had resonated with her since High School, writing: 

‘Sylvia Plath is amazing. If a little too on-the-nose for my feminine angst. Also I feel I can relate with Sexton more. Perhaps because she’s more contemporary. And I’m a housewife with depression lol.’

I felt an immediate kinship with Bailey. During that pissup I sat alone, excitedly messaging the person who had seemed to give my life meaning all year. 

The next morning I was hungover, and checked my phone at 6:53am.

Seeing this notification, a bolt of electricity shot through my body. BAILEY! TALKING! TO ME!! I could not believe what was happening.

From then on, we talked every day. Each time I got a notification I was almost breathless with excitement. I sent her sections of poetry I liked, and she began to tell me more about her interest in spirituality and the Occult.

I’m going to repeat a poem I wrote at this time in full here, because I think it shows pretty well the way I saw her as a liberated being, while at the same time increasingly understood my own (male) body as something I was deeply uncomfortable with. Now I read it as being unmistakably about dysphoria.

18/09/18 No. 1

the masticated 
body

hangs
dream-ravaged

on old hooks,
thin and

lungless,
sucked out, empty

every tendon
flecked 

with stretched 
muscle

the body is mine:
I own it.

(up there,
and

among the
lunar

flower trees
fantastically,

beautily
lovely

aloud
and astonishingly

bright,
you scream and breathe)

We talked about everything: her feelings about her career, the world, our politics, conspiracy theories, our experiences with drugs, our favourite TV shows. 

By the 27th of September, 2 days before uni, she had me reading the Tao Te Ching, which, to this day, is probably still the religious text that has had the biggest impact on me. Throughout Sixth Form I had been interested in the Bhagavad Gita, but to read this new text through Bailey’s eyes made it all the more profound. Particularly, I thought, because the translation she specifically recommended to me used gendered pronouns interchangeably: on one page the Master would be ‘he’, on the next, ‘she’. My fascination with what I came to see as a specifically feminine spirituality only gripped me further as the months went by. 

So, this was the context that immediately proceeded me arriving at Cambridge for my first day on the 29th of September. Throughout my first term, as I mentioned before, I was sure to mention Bailey to everyone I knew- desperate to ensure that they come to associated me with her. In those first weeks I read Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, empowered by its bold transsexual sensuality. 

I loved the newfound freedom I had at university. I felt like I was finally free to reinvent myself. I had joined LGBT+ group chats for my year during the previous summer in anticipation, and was keen to meet transfemmes, though if asked about it I would’ve insisted that I wanted to date them. The gender I presented during this period was Chaser. lol. 

To add to this, I had a new set of clothes that I had brought specifically for university. As had been the case for much of my teen years, I just tried to pick the boy clothes that would make me feel the least dysphoric, rather than picking out anything I particularly liked. But, as things went, I was generally pretty happy with the ones I had for uni: some grey cropped trousers that accentuated my hips (which I still wear to this day haha), another pair of bright orange, patterned trousers, some more skinny navy cropped ones, and some boring jumpers. I also had some tartan shirts, which I used enjoy noting made me ‘look like lesbian’.

When the day came to sign up for college-based societies, so energised was I by my conversations with Bailey, I went to sign up for Magdaladies, a women’s group at my college. But the presence of my new (male friends) with me, and the fact that the group was ran by the intimidating popular girls of the year above made me shy away. 

In my first week I went to Glitterbomb, the university LGBT+ night, and was keen to be a part of LGBT spaces, even though I felt like I couldn’t articulate why I was a member of that community beyond the single word, ‘Bailey’. I knew I wanted to be a part of it though. 

Over the following 5 months or so- my first two terms of univeristy- Bailey became my closest friend. We talked often for hours each night. Two weeks into my initial month subscription, Bailey told me that since we were ‘friends now’, I didn’t need to pay to speak to her, and she added me for real. I was delighted to have this new friend.

Over the coming weeks, as I made new friends and did all the typical Cambridgey things. I continued to keep them updated of the progress of mine and Bailey’s relationship. At the same time, I kept Bailey updated on what my life was like at uni, and she continued to be a warm, reassuring presence in these months of change.

Contrary to my assumption that having a good conversation with Bailey would provide a sense of closure to my teenage infatuation, as time went on my adoration for her and her transness only seemed to grow.

We maintained long snapchat streaks, and were ‘Super BFFs’ on snapchat for many months. I came to suspect that maybe I was the one person Bailey talked to the most in her life- more than her husband even. After all, we spoke at length almost every day. 

Each day, I waited until the afternoon when she would be awake and started messaging her. Though often she messaged first I was usually so excited to get talking each day that I would have sent something to her by 8am in the morning in her time zone. We never struggled with what to talk about.

I would lay in my bed messaging you until late
And go to bed ecstatic, telling all my friends about it
And the next day walking around inspired.
It was magical, truly. Waiting eagerly until after lunch
To send my first message on the walk back from
The library to account for the 5 hour time difference,
Catching you mid-morning as you woke up, having already
Lived half my day in expectation.

I remember finishing a conversation with her once around midnight and going on Spotify right after. For the first time, I listened to the song Be Safe by The Cribs. It meant everything.

She introduced me to more of the occult, and recommended I read Aleister Crowley, a British occult writer of the early 20th century who wrote the founding text of of his new religion, titled Liber AL vel Legis or, The Book of the Law. Crowley said that it was dictated to him by a beyond-human being who called himself ‘Aiwass’.

Its primary lesson, famously, was, ‘do what thou wilt’, a teaching that is generally taken to mean that to embrace one’s desire is the goal of life. I devoured this and other texts.

Through this time, Bailey seemed to take up a wider, more religious presence in my life, as I knitted her and her transness into my own sense of a feminine spirituality that I had been cultivating. She represented so much more than herself, but, at the same time, she was now also the friend by my side during my first months of university, giving me confidence with my new friends in college.

She was on my mind near constantly. Even when I wrote essays about Medieval poetry, they all seemed to be about her. Every ‘she’ I read, was her. I saw her everywhere, and it felt like all signs pointed back to her. 

At the end of first term, I bought some foundation and started wearing it regularly throughout the second term, though my initial plan had been to wear it every day. I felt freer and freer, and got an Asos order of women’s clothes over the next few weeks. 

In the meantime, she was into tarot and mothman and that kinda stuff, and she told me all about it. She told me about UFO conspiracy theories, which, while I kept them at arm’s length, I absorbed earnestly, both in what she told me about them and the videos she recommend I watch. 

Every time she recommended something to me, I watched or read it and reported back. Kate Bornstein, Bob Lazar, John Waters movies, Grey Gardens. Each time, we discussed it in detail, and as she shaped the culture I absorbed, she started referring to herself as my ‘Queer Godmother’. She seemed to have a kind of endless knowledge for queer pop culture. 

With glee, I told her about what I new about transness and about all the books and music with trans characters that I mention in Reading 5. 

As I wrote in Reading 7, which covers this period from a slightly different angle, my life felt very beautiful during this period. Water cast reflections on my ceiling and I felt like I was moving towards a big secret.

My room was different then- clean, it smelled clean.
It had the fresh sterility of a new life to be lived. The receding
Lines of independence and a place to grow in air. 
‘If you ever need a mantra to repeat in your head. I used this one
A Lot. It evokes love. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna. Hare Hare. Hare rama. Hare rama. Rama rama. Hare Hare.’

At the same time, I loved my new friends at university, and that I could tell them openly about what Bailey and I had been talking about. While several members of my group were very transphobic, I took a sense of pride in my still mentioning her constantly. They changed my name in the group chat to ‘Bailey Gay’ to tease me, but, if anything, having her name as my own felt good. When I shaved my armpits they showed their disdain. When I wore makeup they were surprised, but not really. 

When I did these things to feminise myself, I didn’t really know why I was doing it. It just seemed logical, what with everything else going on in my life. 

It literally felt as if her life force , her energy, was the very same that animated me- like she was an intangible presence in everything I did. Like she was everything, and I a function of her. 

“so that
sometimes it’s very hard to tell 
whether 
I want to love you
or want to be you” 

Whenever we weren’t talking, I often imagined what she was doing, what her life without me must’ve been like. During our late night conversations we had talked about her childhood, her upbringing in Richmond VA. She told me about the 7-11 where she first bought makeup and how she first started hormones. 

One night, we looked together on google maps, and, eventually, found her childhood home. She hadn’t seen it in years. 

Sunset Sex With Bailey Jay increasingly felt like my attempt to understand her life, what it must’ve been to grow up in America, and, most importantly, to grow up trans. 

In January of 2019, I visited my friend from sixth form, Johnny, at his university in Brighton for an acid trip. When it all got a bit overwhelming, I messaged her, and she got me to listen to Bjork’s All Is Full of Love. 

Laying on Johnny’s bed, staring at the swirling wood-pattern on the wardrobe, I remember vividly thinking that there was something linking me and her that I couldn’t figure out, and that I was just about to break through that very, very thin wall.

On the way home from that trip, Bailey seemed like she was everywhere: 

ON THE TRAIN HOME THE NEXT DAY, THE IDEAS OF THE TRIP 
HAVING NOT COME TOGETHER INTO A WHOLE AND
HAVING NO CLEAR ANSWERS AS A RESULT
On the sides of industrial buildings, silver letters and then
reflected gold. On the train home sign on side of building
BAILEY AND something passed by the window and I wondered
whether it had all come together.

-from an individual poem during this period

We only continued to become closer as spring came. One day, I was laying on my bed and saw my own dick, which I usually avoided seeing. Quite suddenly the thought came to me: that looks like Bailey’s. For the first time in my life, I felt okay about having one. I’ve never really felt like this since, but this was a significant moment for me. If she could have a dick and be a girl, maybe mine was okay after all, I thought. Somehow, I STILL hadn’t accepted that I was trans. Denial, am I right?

Another day, when I told her I ‘wanted to talk to her about something’, she said ‘you wanna be a chick?’ ‘No, not that haha’, I had said. 

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I started talking to Bailey less and less from Summer 2019 as I became closer with Katie. Seeing as my attraction to women was already in question, I felt like whatever Bailey had meant to me challenged my capacity be a cishet male boyfriend too significantly, meaning she was best left alone. I still had a brilliant third term, and was, to some extent, still riding the wave of the months I had from being close friends with Bailey. 

Even after realising I was trans in Summer 2019, and my subsequent denial and two year stint presenting as a gay man, Bailey still loomed large over my life. Still, after all this time had passed, and my obsession with her was overcome by my general crisis of faith, she seemed to hold the answer from a distance. We talked occasionally, and the secret, which I had rejected because of its enormity, lay dormant. 

One of those conversations made it into a poem in my 2021 collection Swimming Pool, Tennis Court. It was when I, reluctantly, told her I was actually gay, not feeling like it was the truth:

Congratulations babe you’re in for a way more fun life! 
And the same image diluted.
I feel ill.

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I guess I have to try to summarise this. Nowadays Bailey and I talk a few times a year, usually for a pretty decent conversation. I still adore talking to her, though now her presence has shifted. 

Looking back, she was, and will always be, one of the most important people in my life. She was the queer elder- though she was only 30!!- who I had never had. More than that, she showed me just how joyous, and complex and real a life as a transsexual could be. And quite incredibly, she managed to exceed my enormous expectations as to what she would be like.

All that time, I had been confused: did I want to love her, or did I want to be her? She had seemed to hold the key to my own life, and every time she messaged me I had felt like she was getting me closer to an answer. I am eternally grateful for everything she did for me: for the reassurance, and the love, and the good times we shared chatting during those long evenings in my first terms living on my own. She gave me solace and confidence in those crucial months.

Over the year of 2018-2019, Bailey had become the nexus of everything to me: transness, love, spirituality. And, while you can probably tell this obsession took on a perhaps unhealthy aspect, it was, in truth, an experience that took me closer to myself and my spirituality. 

Even now, I try to recover that sense of spirituality that Bailey taught me through conversation and recommendation- how I always knew that her response to any situation would begin with a kind of unconditional love. At the time, I saw that as the strongest, most powerful thing. I struggle to think that way nowadays, but hope that one day I will believe it again. I look up to her for that to this day.

In my transition, she has been incredibly supportive and flattering towards me, as she always has been.

When I was reading Darryl by Jackie Ess, I came across a line that seemed to capture what Bailey meant to me. The book’s closeted trans narrator uses it to conclude a message he sends to Oothoon, the trans woman who begins to open up his cisnormative world:

“I don’t think we’re the same but I think you might be the only one in the world who can see the place I’m in now and can see me. I’m so lost. You took a different turn, one I can’t understand, but I think it might be better. Rescue me from the puzzle of the dance.”

All that time I had wanted rescuing. From confusion, from dysphoria, from non-personhood. I had wanted an identity of my own. 

I hope that Bailey and I stay in touch. I only have the upmost respect and reverence for her, her openness and generosity with me even as I stood blind to myself. 

Phew, this has been a long one. It’s nearly Christmas time (!) and I’ve got a lot of piss-ups lined up, just as I did in the Summer of 2018. This time, though, I get to go as myself. Whenever I check in with Bailey I like to send her a picture to show her how far I’ve come. 

09/12/2023