Last month, I wrote two posts--"The Unbearable Whiteness of Cycling" and "Our Bodies, Our Bikes"--in which I describe how some people are discouraged from bicycling because they don't see themselves represented in images of cycling and cyclists. Too often, ads and other media show only certain types of people astride bikes. Usually, they are young and Caucasian--and thin, especially if they are female. By implication, the folks depicted in those images are, or seem to be, middle-to-upper class professionals or living on trust funds.
And they all seem to fit cultural notions of gender and sexuality as well as they fit the "lifestyle" apparel they wear. The women might be fit, even somewhat muscular, but they always fit into standards of femininity and attractiveness of their milieu. The men likewise fit into their society's ideas of masculinity. Nowhere does one find any hit of gender non-conformity or "queerness."
In those posts, I also mentioned that I nearly gave up cycling when I started my gender-affirmation process because while I saw dudes on bikes who looked something like the guy named Nick I was--and images of men like that--I didn't see many of middle-aged women and, although I had mental images of the woman I wanted to be, I really had no idea of what I'd actually become, other than a woman named Justine, and whether she would be anything like any of the few women I saw on bikes.
That, after I spent much of my life cycling--and some of my youth participating in other sports--in an attempt to fit into those notions of masculinity (and heterosexuality) represented, not only in bike-related ads and art, but in the general culture. And, I must say that I fit in, at least somewhat: I got respect in my circles of bike riders and other athletes as well as from teachers and professors. Sometimes I was teased for not bragging about sexual conquests of girls or women, but the taunts could be taken only so far when the taunters and teasers saw me beside a woman.
Now, I've been talking about seeing myself, or one's self in images of cycling and cyclists. While I am referring to visual and graphic ones, I am not referring only to them: I know how much all of us--gay, straight, trans, cis, male, female, White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, Pacific/Alaskan Native, rich, poor, or whatever--need to hear our stories echoed, or at least paralleled, in the ones told in books, magazines and newspapers, or on websites, radio, television, film or podcasts.
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| Alex Showerman in the White Mountains of New Hampshire |
That is why I had a brief catharsis in reading about Alex Showerman. As much as she excelled as a cyclist, as well as in other sports and in school, "I was not experiencing the world as I wanted to, and the world didn't see me as I wanted to be seen." This sense of isolation and alienation led to depression, which she tried to numb with alcohol.
In 2015, she began seeing a gender therapist to make sense of who she is. Last July, on a bike trip in New Hampshire with two of her closest friends, she "came out" for the first time. She never felt so free, she said: She finally could ride just for the love of riding rather than to "outrun her shadows," as a Bicycling article put it, or to pound herself into maleness, as I tried to do.
I am happy that she has begun to live as her true self a decade and a half earlier in her life than I did in mine--and that she realizes that life includes cycling. She might become the cyclist in an image in which some young trans girl or boy--or other gender or sexual non-conformist--sees him-, her- or them-self for the first time.
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