Lydia Rogue - True Trans Bike Rebel

taking the lane #15

True Trans Bike Rebel

edited by Lydia Rogue with Elly Blue, 2019

This Edition Microcosm Publishing, 2019

All work remains property of its creator 2018

First Printing

Elly Blue Publishing, an imprint of

Microcosm Publishing

2752 N Williams Ave.

Portland, OR 97227

(503) 799-2698

TakingTheLane.com

Find mor e feminist bicycle books, zines, and art at www.microcosm.Pub

Cover art by Trista Vercher who draws anthropomorphic cats while cuddling their own. They can be found at VercherInk . com / about

Designed by Joe Biel

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ISBN 978-1-62106-856-3

This is Microcosm #347

Made in the U.S.A. If you bought this on Amazon, Im so sorry. You could have gotten it cheaper and suppo rted a small, independent publisher at Microcosm.Pub

Get in touch with your submissions for the next issue of Taking the Lane ! Please send submissions and inquiries to or learn more about the zine at TakingTheLane.com

Microcosm Publishing is Portlands most diversified publishing house and distributor with a focus on the colorful, authentic, and empowering. Our books and zines have put your power in your hands since 1996, equipping readers to make positive changes in their lives and in the world around them. Microcosm emphasizes skill-building, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and bookettes about DIY skills, food, bicycling, gender, self-care, and social justice. What was once a distro and record label was started by Joe Biel in his bedroom and has become among the oldest independent publishing houses in Portland, OR. We are a politically moderate, centrist publisher in a world that has inched to the right for the past 80 years. More recently, Elly Blue Publishing/Taking the Lane merged with Microcosm Publishing in 2015.

Since 2010, Taking The Lane is a feminist bicycle zine. Find past issues and contribute to future ones at TakingTheLane.com

Introduction

Lydia Rogue

H eres a confession: Im not much of a cyclist.

I own a bike, and take it out for a ride now and again, but its not really my thing. Instead, I swim.

And theres an eloquent metaphor I could paint. It would draw parallels between swimming and cycling, and it would conclude that theyre part of the same general community, even though theyre differentthe same way all trans and nonbinary people have their own experiences and move through life in their own way but still connect through the same community.

There are metaphors everywhere for cycling and being trans.

I could make one about the time I flew over the handlebars of my bike when I was twelve, shredding palms and knees on gravel and compare it to the pain of being misgendered or the pain of being trans/nonbinary in a cis-centric world.

Theres yet another, pointing out the similarities between getting back on my bike for the first time, almost a year later, and coming out for the first time, or between the spike of fear you get when a car comes just a little too close and the dreaded moment when you get clocked as trans.

Theres a less painful, equally eloquent metaphor I could make, comparing the freedom of riding a bike, pushing yourself a little further and soaking in the adrenalin, to gender euphoria.

There are more metaphors, good and bad, than there are spokes in a bike shop, so Im not going to elaborate on them here. You know them all already, youve likely made them yourself at some point in your life. (We all know that the only way to deal with the pain sometimes is to make a joke at your own expense.)

This isnt a place for metaphors or for distilling our experiences down into small pieces that cis people can swallowthat cis people can understand.

This is a place for us .

This is a place where we can simply be, without prying eyes making demands on how we present or invading our spaces demanding we do emotional labor for them. This is a place that has been carved out with us in mind. If you like, its a safe space where we can talk and laugh and share our experiences and learn that its okay if we dont fit into the stereotypesand its okay if we do.

But where is this place?

Taking the Lane #1 was called Sharing the Road with Boys . It focused on Elly Blues encounters on a sexist road and having to deal with the day-to-day misogyny found in riding while being a cis woman.

To me, Taking the Lane means women taking what women deservetaking a part of the world that had been denied to them for so long, being allowed to take up spaceto be loud, to be angry, to be heard.

With everything going on in the world, and specifically the US, its impossible to claim that cis women have finally been granted this freedom, but at the same time, its easy to see how cis women are granted privileges and rights that trans and nonbinary people can only dream of.

Because of this, for this issue were taking up the space we deserve too.

Ive said this before, and Ill say it again: this issue is about us, by us, for us. We get to be wholly ourselves in this issue without trying to force ourselves into boxes that have to be checked off before we can be given basic treatments.

There are no boxes here, only open roads and open spaces for everyone to be themselves. This is our lane, and so I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

On a more serious note, please use discretion when reading through the zine. Our lives are not gentle ones, free from oppression and difficulties. Within these pages, youll read stories of transphobia, abuse, homophobia, sexual assault and more. Sadly, this is part of our current day to day lives, an inescapable reality of living in a ciscentric world. Every story will be preceded by appropriate content warnings, so please heed them and use self-care as needed while reading these stories. To leave out these things would be dishonest about how we move through this world and so theyre present.

Love,

Lydia

they/them

Everything I Needed To Know About Being Trans I Learned On The Pan-American Highway

Elly Bangs

cw: suicidal ideation

O n Exhaustion

T here were days of squeaking pitifully through the middle of a thousand miles of desert with a gritty headwind whipping me in the face against every turn of the crankjust like there are days when I get misgendered one or ten or a hundred times too many. There were afternoons spent hauling myself straight up the Sierra Madre in a sweltering heat, and evenings when I was too exhausted to reach the next town, or to even pitch a tent where I stealth campedand all night long, wild dogs came down from the hills to sniff my face and scatter my half-dreams. A year later those days became the perfect metaphor for the ones when transition felt impossible; when I exceeded my pain tolerance; when I couldnt make myself believe my skin could ever be more than an ill-fitting disguise or a utilitarian means to some end. For an inward eternity, I was climbing a ten thousand foot hill and looking up into the clouds, then rising to meet them, then breathing them in and shivering through their mist, then looking down on them from above, watching them crawl and churn against a cliffside that couldve been perched on the edge of outer space. One day on the road I looked back and tried to mentally calculate the angle from where I was to where Id started, and it dawned on me that to do that now Id have to look down and through the mantle of the Earth; many times in transition I despaired to think nothing had really changed, until I stumbled on some old photoand in its sheer strangeness, in the disbelief that I had ever been that person, I re-realized that everything had. I never thought of myself as someone with the will or endurance to make it nearly so farbut I exerted just a little bit every day until it added up to something amazing. To someone I never knew I had it in myself to be.