Carving out a life: a trans woodworker in Charlottesville
In a converted barn on the edge of Charlottesville, Virginia, chisels meet timber in the morning air. Jesse Henson, a trans man in his late thirties, runs a woodworking studio that has become a fixture in the regional maker scene. His benches, cabinets and reclaimed-wood tables ship from a small workshop tucked behind a row of shotgun houses, each piece signed with a tiny rainbow inlay.
What began as a lockdown distraction now supports two employees, a rotating roster of apprentices, and a growing list of custom commissions. Henson spoke about the path from a corporate job to a fully booked order book, the way his craft reshaped his relationship with his body, and why he sees woodworking as a quiet form of advocacy in the American South.
Early life and the long road to self
Henson grew up in rural Tennessee, the kind of place where the local feed store doubles as a gossip hub and the high school carpentry class was the closest thing to art education on offer. He remembers dragging home weathered fence boards from his grandfather's property before he understood what he was doing with them. "I thought everyone spent Saturday afternoons planing down rough pine," he says.
Coming out as trans in his early twenties meant navigating family estrangement, a move to North Carolina, and years of IT support work while saving for top surgery. He spent four years in Edinburgh in a flat above a chip shop, where a community college woodworking class gave him his first taste of the workshop. The bench, he says, was the first place where the body he had worked so hard to reshape could simply be useful, without commentary.
A pivot shaped by a global pause
When COVID-19 emptied Melbourne offices in 2020, an Australian friend sent Henson a video of a Bunnings sausage sizzle fundraiser and joked that he should try selling cutting boards the same way. The idea lodged in his mind. Back in Virginia, he converted his garage into a usable studio, building a workbench from construction-grade pine and teaching himself joinery through YouTube tutorials filmed in sheds from Sydney to Perth.
The business began almost by accident, after a neighbour posted a photo of his first bookcase online. Within twelve months, orders were generating enough income to leave his IT contract. He now sells to clients across the Mid-Atlantic, takes commissions for Richmond restaurants, and runs quarterly workshops in his barn space.
The materials that shape the work
Henson works predominantly with three species, each chosen for its character and its backstory. White oak is reclaimed from barn demolitions in the Blue Ridge foothills, walnut is salvaged from urban tree removals in Charlottesville, and the occasional piece of spotted gum arrives through a small importer who works with First Nations cooperatives in Queensland. He treats every board as a record of its previous life, refusing filler where nail holes and saw marks can be preserved.
Clients who commission a dining table often send in family heirlooms, and Henson incorporates the wood into new forms rather than discarding it. The full breakdown below sits next to his calculator and his coffee grinder in the workshop, a reminder that even a meditative craft runs on a spreadsheet.
| Material | Source | Typical use | Working notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reclaimed white oak | Deconstructed barns in the Blue Ridge | Dining tables, benches | Dense, requires sharp tools; takes oil finish well |
| Urban-salvage walnut | Tree removals in Charlottesville | Cabinetry, serving boards | Rich colour, soft enough for hand tools |
| Spotted gum | Importer working with Queensland cooperatives | Outdoor seating, counter tops | Naturally oily, excellent weather resistance |
| Construction-grade pine | Local hardware supplier | Jigs, workshop furniture | Cheap, forgiving, ideal for apprentices |
The tools and patterns reward patience, he adds. A weekend of planing by hand removes a millimetre of material that a thicknesser would have taken in seconds, but it also reveals the grain in a way no machine can match.
The studio and the city that shaped it
Charlottesville is best known for the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, and a downtown mall lined with independent bookshops and coffee bars. The queer scene here is smaller than in nearby Washington or Atlanta, but it is unusually tight-knit, with a cluster of LGBTQ-owned businesses around West Main Street and a community centre that hosts regular film nights. Henson sources his hardware locally and his timber from a sawmill about an hour west in the Blue Ridge foothills.
Virginia passed explicit trans-inclusive protections at the state level in 2020, putting it ahead of several Australian states that still rely on a patchwork of federal complaints mechanisms through the Australian Human Rights Commission. Henson says that legal clarity has made it easier to register the studio, open a business bank account and update identity documents across agencies, without the limbo he watched friends navigate in Texas and Florida.
Craft, pricing and a philosophy of repair
Henson prices each piece by the hour, the material and the design fee, with no hidden margin. His numbers land roughly in line with bespoke furniture studios in Sydney's Inner West, where a similar solid-timber bench can run from AUD 2,400 to AUD 4,800 before design fees. He believes transparency around cost is itself a queer value, a refusal of the opaque mark-ups that have priced younger buyers out of owning anything solid.
The studio website lists hourly rates, material costs and a clear margin, and visitors curious about regional community resources can browse Richmond wellness listings for related offerings in the broader queer scene across Virginia.
Navigating identity in the rural South
Running a small business as a visibly trans man in central Virginia still draws occasional pushback. Henson has fielded comments from older customers, dealt with a single threatening voicemail, and learned to read a room before handing over keys to his workshop for after-hours pickups. He keeps a trans flag above the lathe and a small sign on the front door, and apprentices are warned in advance that pronouns are not up for debate.
He pushes back against the assumption that queer identity and traditional craft sit in opposition. "Woodworking has always been queer," he argues, pointing to the 1970s American craft revival, to transgender pattern-cutters in Savile Row, to the leatherworkers of Sydney's Redfern. For readers tracing the broader cultural map of regional queer life, Uniteva Magazine offers profiles, news and event listings across Virginia.
The lessons stacked on the workbench
The studio now runs a six-month waiting list, with regular clients including a local yoga studio, a coffee roaster near the downtown mall, and a wedding venue in the Shenandoah Valley that orders arbours and signage. Henson donates a percentage of each sale to a trans youth housing fund, a model borrowed from Melbourne makers running communal studios in Brunswick and Collingwood.
He mentors two apprentices through a local trade school partnership, both young queer people who remind him of his own garage-bound early days. The mentorship covers joinery and finishing along with pricing, contracts and tax, topics he had to teach himself after IT, which is why he wanted a way to find local maker peers faster than cold-emailing strangers.
Henson's story is not an overnight success but a slow accumulation of small, deliberate choices: choosing the body he wanted to live in, choosing a craft that could travel with him, and choosing to build his business in a place where being openly trans remains a daily, conscious act rather than an abstract right. For Australian readers considering a similar leap, the parallels are closer than they might appear. Both countries share a strong culture of weekend DIY, a thriving maker fair circuit, and a network of queer-friendly studios in cities from Sydney to Adelaide. The legal terrain differs, but the practical toolkit is shared: a willingness to start small, a habit of documenting everything, and a community willing to recommend your work to the next customer walking through the door.