I wrote this for CZ community, however with recent news of Texas and Florida trans and reproductive rights bans, I feel this should be shared with my wider community with more context.
Like many of you, I kept pulse of CX Worlds in Arkansas in light of last years debates and anti-trans bills. And it got me thinking about the hard conversations we hold at the zine and why we need to continue to talk about “racing is a cop’ and cyclings needed abolitionist movement.
We know that car culture creeps into bike culture and demands that bicycling be homogenized into a single “correct” form that emphasizes able-bodied speed and exclusion. This form of cycling reproduces and re-inscribes hierarchies and fragmentation of the streets built for cars is entrenched in bike racing culture and governing bodies. Images and depictions of what a cycling pro looks like, with aero, watts, speed, lightweight gadgets promising you how to hack pro stats, all seep into bike culture in many insidious ways from advertising, images, marketing, clothing and more.
Despite the powerful and destructive impacts of neoliberal ordering of streets and sport culture, there are and always have been radical politics and movements that challenge the exploitation of what streets and sports are founded upon. White supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. You may be wondering what all that has to do with cycling? Everything. It literally shapes our cities, policies, media, health cares systems, bike sizes, bike clothing size, representation, and look pro narratives.
As a zine and community, we’ve been talking about abolition since the George Floyd uprisings. From police to violent systems, abolition goes beyond institutions. Its about the way we internalize ideological social heirarchies based in white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. It’s about dismantling the systems of those ideologies that create fatphobia, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, racism, colorism, classism and so much more! Abolition as a radical movement is not just about closing the doors to violent institutions, but also about building up and recovering institutions and practices and relationships that nurture wholeness, self-determination, and transformation. Abolition is not some distant future but something we create in every moment when we say no to the traps of empire and yes to the nourishing possibilities dreamed of and practiced by our ancestors and friends. Abolition is about breaking down things that oppress and building up things that nourish. Abolition is the practice of transformation: in the here and now and the ever after.
I know folks are triggered by the ideas of abolition as a movement in cycling because they clutch onto their unearned privileges in a system that validates them upholding the patriarchal and colonial gaze and system. However, I believe we must wrestle with significant demands the cycling community is asking for. This is a wake-up call that an increasingly sleepy cycling movement needs. The true potential of racial, queer, and trans politics cannot be found in attempting to reinforce our tenuous right to exist in systems by undermining someone else’s. If it is not clear already, we are all in this together. To claim our legacy of beautiful impossibility is to begin practicing ways of being with one another and making.
In an age when thousands of people are murdered annually in the name of white cis-heteronormative patriarchy, where millions of people are locked up to protect law, national borders, and order, and black squares and rainbow washing cycling organizations march hand in hand with cops in Pride parades, being impossible may just be the best thing we’ve got going for ourselves: Impossibility may very well be our only possibility.
With attacks on trans youth escalating across the US, how can we support ‘impossible futures’ for youth and resist by uplifting trans joy? I encourage you to read + SHARE these accounts by @TLDEF (Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund) in @ACLU‘s needed case against Arkansas’s ban on gender-affirming healthcare for trans minors.
Possibly the most important things we can do to ensure that similar legislation doesn’t pass federally and in our own states is ensure civil rights and protections against discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. We may not be able to address Arkansas, Florida, or Texas in this moment, it takes mass mobilization, but with more than half of US states considering forms of anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ, and anti reproductive rights legislation, we should consider that our states can be a battle ground for these civil rights, as they have been before.
Perhaps creating safe spaces in cycling is the work we can do along with supporting our local pro-lgbtqia organizations.
And before I close this out, I want to highlight somethings I’ve seen that I feel need to be said. This isn’t a criticism but a concern. For cyclists advocating on these issue, even our most “well-intentioned” strategies and movements will reproduce the prison industrial complex’s norms of transphobic, misogynist, and racist violence and micro aggressions. So I encourage even the well intentioned cishet and white activists that your research, media, cultural work, and activism on this issue needs to be accountable to and directed by low-income transgenderpeople and transgenderpeople of color and their organizations. As much as I love amplifying the words of the most outspoken activist, I’m well aware of the whiteness and privilege that is centered in the forefront of cycling lgbtqia+ organizations and activism and how they coopt and undermine the visibility and work of Black and Indigenous trans movements who have long been on the frontlines against colonial binaries.
I have become skeptical of the revolutionary potential of cycling advocates because the way I see a shift in terms of resistance from revolution and transformation to inclusion and reform. However, I for one will always continue to challenge neoliberal insider work through counter narratives and frameworks of direct action and abolition. Cycling loves its heroes and their narratives but thankfully they are not the end of the story.
image via @t_seplavy