Maria Griffiths, the trans bike punk at the center of Imogene Binnie’s Nevada, has a monologue early in the novel about her love for her bicycle. She offers various reasons for her bicycle riding, chief among them the cost of riding the subway. But Maria admits the real reason she keeps going on late night rides and melting into the road as she weaves through cars and recovers from being doored, is that being on her bicycle is the only time Maria gets to be alone.
I moved to Chicago in the summer of 2019. At the time, I was trying on the phrase nonbinary like a pair of shoes that didn’t quite fit but looked cute anyway. I was still hiding my feminine qualities and telling myself that I definitely wasn’t THAT kind of trans. I’d bought a fixed gear in anticipation of the move, but quickly found my legs weren’t built for it. I sold it for weed money a month into living here. A year later, during the early days of trying out my new name and trying to figure out who would give me estrogen, I spent a hundred bucks on a bright blue eighties road bike with bright yellow handlebar tape. The colors of my father’s favorite hockey team. Suddenly, with the ability to coast through the streets returned to me, I took off. I scheduled parts of my day that were only for speeding through my neighborhood aimlessly, letting a hand-me-down dress a friend gave me flutter behind me in the wind. Whenever I would hop off my bike, to go into a store or take a drink of water, I'd get a confused look from some older man. Not a hateful look, but a quizzical one. “what’s different about this one?” their eyes would say before being overcome with terror about the fact that the tranny they were staring at started snarling at them, water dripping down her face onto the small buds on her chest because she’s been pedaling for two miles straight and she’s too stoned and tired to drink right.
But then I got to tear away with the bouncing souls blaring off a tinny blue tooth speaker I got for ten dollars at a chain store. Burning legs, letting my shoulders brace in a more masculine way, the way you generally avoid when you are a trans woman who is standing on flat ground because posture is so important.
You can’t be demure on a bicycle. You are forced to forget every trans femme blog about posture that sounds like it was written in the fifties because you have more important things to pay attention to, like getting doored, or running into the back of a car because it stopped too soon. Your body stops being a thing you’re self-conscious about and starts becoming a tool for you. It does what it’s told. Pedal faster, speed up. Don’t pedal, slow down. The only universal truths present in bicycling.
Bicycles force you to be present. Present in your own transsexual body. You have to acknowledge the ways it’s changed that aren’t cosmetic. Who cares about your tits or your waist? You've been pedaling for six blocks straight and you’ve gotta figure out if you feel lucky enough to blow through a stop sign because you’re a dangerous punk rock bike girl now. Your legs aren’t as strong as they used to be when you played hockey, and you’re getting tired, and if you don’t stop you might crash. Your looks, a thing that trans women are obsessed with because they’re life or death, don’t really matter either. Even though your maxi dress is floating in the sharp Chicago wind and you probably look amazing. A bicycle is a key past all the bullshit that informs trans women’s experience of the world. You don’t have the danger of being a trans woman in any situation, waiting for someone to confront you. You just have a rusty machine, and all there is to do is operate the pedals.
I first realized I wasn’t safe on public transit after about six months of estrogen. My experience of being a trans woman in the world might be a little charmed. I only came out after ya know, the plague. I was riding on a red line train, going out to buy a bong for twenty-five dollars from a girl on the west side. It took me by surprise, mostly because I wasn’t presenting as anything. I was just reading a book, trying to hide the title, wearing a big puffy jacket that does not show off my confusing baby curves or the small bumps of the chest. Then suddenly I had a hand on my knife as a man asked, “what are you?” and proceeded to get way too close, asking if I knew what the word transition meant, as it was used several times on the page I was reading. I froze up. I didn’t get mad or loud or act like a dignified woman or a badass feral tranny. I just looked at my shoes and kept my hand on my folding knife. I didn’t even open it. He didn’t see me as a lady. Just an other with weird posture and bright orange hair hidden under a hat my mom knitted for me. Another guy sat there watching. Eventually, the man just kinda wandered off.
I haven’t really been on transit since, though I also don’t really have anywhere to go. Life is funny like that. You don’t feel safe going more than a few miles from your own apartment, so you build a life that doesn’t require you to do anything outside of those few miles. Your friends on the northside invite you over, and you lure them down south instead. It's not so hard.
Being trans is revolutionary. Being trans is beautiful and transition is an exciting thing. But being trans is scary, too. It’s scary because of other people. But when I am on my bicycle I do not think about that. When I am on my bicycle I do not have to think about Dan Savage or any of the people on this website that harass me for the crime of existing. I spent the first 21 years of my life in an aimless, self-destructive haze. After coming out of it, nothing really makes sense to me. I don’t know how to flirt or how to be friends with other women. I don’t know the rules of how women speak to men, or if I'm accidentally giving a pass to bad behavior. But my bike makes sense to me. Pedal faster, you speed up. Don’t pedal, you slow down.