If You Like This Blog, Thank bell hooks

If you've been following this blog for a while, you may have noticed that every once in a while I invoke what I'll call herein the Howard Cosell Rule. I am so naming it for the sportscaster who interrupted his play-by-play and commentary of an NFL game to announce the murder of John Lennon.  About a dozen years earlier, he deviated from the format of his radio program to talk about the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

He received a lot of hate mail--which included slurs against his Jewishness and questioning of his manhood--for reminding viewers that, indeed, some things are more important than what your favorite football or baseball team is doing on the field.  That, of course, is what some fans didn't want to hear:  When it wasn't impugning his heritage, actual or perceived sexual orientation or political leanings, the angry responses said, in essence, that he should stick to sports because that's what they tuned in to hear.

Of course, these days, you'd have to be comatose to think that politics, economics, history, gender identity and expression and sexual orientation can be separated from games, matches or tournaments. (Simone Biles and Colin Kaepernick, anyone?) And I am always conscious of the fact that I started this blog because I am a middle-aged (depending on your definition of it!) transgender woman who has cycling in one form or another for longer than she’s been living as the person she is.

That said, I am writing today about someone who, to my knowledge, didn't do much cycling. And I have not previously mentioned her on this blog.  But she has as much to do with the person I am, and why I have continued to ride, as anyone has.

bell hooks, from the bell hooks institute

Yesterday Gloria Jean Watkins--better known as bell hooks*--died at age 69 from renal failure.  As I understand, she'd been in failing health for some time.  Physically, that is. I can't get inside her mind, any more than anyone else can, but I feel confident in saying that until her last moment, it worked better than that of most people (including me) at their cognitive best.

So what does she have to do with me, or this blog? Well, first of all, any transgender person owes at least something to her.  Laverne Cox said as much.  hooks, a black feminist scholar who described her sexuality as "queer-pas-gay,"  sowed the seeds of what Kimberle Crenshaw would later call "intersectionality" in feminism and the studies of race, class and culture.  For those of you who didn't take a graduate seminar in gender studies (no shame there, really!), intersectionality explores, as its name implies, the connections between social categories such as race, gender and class--though hooks (and Crenshaw) were careful to point out that while sexism, racism, class bias and homo- and trans-phobia are related, they are not identical.  Thus, while hooks took pains to respect the differences between, say, a white cisgender woman from an upper middle class background trying to break the "glass ceiling" of an organization or profession and an Afro-Latina transgender trying to get medical treatment, she could also see the parallels between, and empathise with, their struggles.

Most important, she challenged her readers to empathise, and to embrace, the ways in which their identities, whatever they are, express themselves.  That is not to say she believed that "anything goes:" her critique of Beyonce says as much.  Rather, she wanted people to free themselves from the mostly-unspoken dictates (many of which she identified as patriarchical) about gender and race into which people are immersed from an early age.

So how did that lead to this blog?  Well, when I was starting my gender affirmation process, I struggled with the question of what, exactly, it would mean to live as a woman.  It changed, it seemed, almost from one day to the next.  In part, that had to do with the time in which I started my process:  In 2003, books like Jennifer Boylan's She's Not There had just come out.  In a recent interview, Boylan said that in re-reading it, she realizes that much of it had an apologetic tone.  She, who started her process about a decade before mine, was trying to conform to some of the very same notions I was--and which bell hooks didn't denounce as much as she said were outmoded and, in some cases, crippling.  

I think that most people who experience gender identity as I have, until recently, realized that they weren't the sex by which they were identified from birth before they understood what living by the gender by which they identify themselves would mean.  That meant, for some of us, things that we look back on with embarrassment: I realize now that, at times, I was performing an exaggerated version of femininity.  Young trans and queer people have the advantage, in part because of people like bell hooks, of realizing that they don't have to accept those notions of gender (I include the ones to which some trans men conform) that were formed by notions of the superiority of a particular gender, race, class or religious group.

For me, figuring out what kind of woman I would be included answering the question of whether I would continue cycling.  At the time I started my affirmation process, I didn't see many female cyclists. I take that back:  I didn't see many who rode as much, as long, as hard, as I was riding in those days.  So I wondered just how much (if any) cycling I could do and still be the woman I was envisioning at the time. 

Then, I realized that I had bought into a frankly hyper-masculine idea about cycling, modeled after the wannabe Eddy Mercxes, Bernard Hinaults and Russian sprinters I saw and sometimes rode with. Over time, my ideas about cycling--and womanhood--changed.  

These days, I am a woman who rides because I love being a woman and I love riding.  The forms each take have changed, and will change, in part because age inevitably changes our minds as well as our bodies.  It took time, but I think I've come to a place where I live and ride as I see fit, whether or not it fits into someone else's ideas about what a woman, a person in mid-life, or a cyclist should be.  For that, I have bell hooks, among others to thank.  She is as good a reason as any for me to invoke the Howard Cosell rule today. 

*--bell hooks always spelled her nom de plume with lower case letters. It's her grandmother's name, which she took in honor of her fighting spirit.  But bell hooks wouldn't capitalize the first letters of her name, she said, because she didn't want to draw attention to herself at the expense of her works.  I hope I don't seem cynical when I say someone as intelligent and perceptive as she was must have known that, for some people, it's exactly what drew attention to her.  I confess:  I am one of them.  I knew nothing about her when I first saw her name and started reading her works out of curiosity because of how she spelled her name.

Stolen Elections And Traffic Lanes

There is nothing so demonstrably false that, if repeated often enough, large numbers of people will take as fact.  

This is especially true today, with social media as such a powerful tool for amplifying misinformation or outright lies.  (I know, you're reading this over social media.  What can I say?) If the election of Donald Trump--and the notion that he had re-election "stolen" from him--hasn't taught us as much, I don't know what will.

One problem, I think, is that people who are in a position to question such stories---a polite way of saying "folks who ought to have well-tuned bullshit detectors"--accept, wittingly or not, misinformation at face value.  They don't question the sources of such stories, let alone how anyone came to the conclusions that are spread as lies or disinformation.

A recent example came in the form of a questionable study that morphed into an urban legend via the British media.  To be fair, such a scenario could have--and probably has--played out in other countries and cities.  It's one thing when the Daily Mail (which, as best as I can tell, seems like England's equivalent of the New York Post) spreads, as we would say in the academic argot, narratives with a tenuous relationship with verities. It's another when outlets as august as the BBC spread such nonsense.  The Daily Mail's headline proclaimed, "Cycle lanes installed at start of COVID pandemic help make London most congested city in the world."  BBC London made it sound more reasonable, or simply toned it down:  "Cycle lanes blamed as city named most congested."

The story could have gotten even more traction had Peter Walker, a reporter on transportation and environmental issues for the Guardian, spoken about it  on a national radio program.  At least, more people would have taken the narrative as an article of faith if he’d spoken about it as the program’s producers might have expected. 

He had been contacted to do that, he says.  As he checked the story, the program's producers decided to bring on somebody else.  From what Walker says, I can't help but to wonder whether the person they chose parroted the lines from the Daily Mail and BBC London items.

Turns out, the business about London being the most congested city came from a report called the "Global Traffic Scorecard."  Its title makes it seem plausible enough--until you realize that it was issued by a company called Inrix, which sells traffic data.

Photo by Dominika Zarzycka, from the Guardian

Now, I haven't been to London in a long time, so I can't offer even anecdotal evidence to confirm or refute the report's conclusion.  For all I know, London might be more congested than Paris or Athens, two large cities in which I've cycled during the past couple of years.  And it may well be more choked with traffic than cities like Luang Prbang or Siem Reap, which I've also recently ridden.  

One problem is that whoever compiled the Inrix report couldn't tell us whether the British capital is more congested than any Asian, African or Latin American city because no such places were included in the study.  

Another is that their determination of London as the most congested city is based on--again I'll revert to academic argot--flawed methodology.  It seems to be based on the premise that traffic is like water:  its flow is determined by the width of the pipe, or road.  Decades of research have refuted this idea (commonly called "induced demand" or, for laypeople, "build it and they will come") about traffic, but it seems to be a foundation for the report--and an Inrix employee who embellished and amplified it.

Peter Lees' official Inrix title is "Director of Operations--Media."  In other words, he's a publicist (which, I blush to admit, I was for a (thankfully) brief time). Such people tend not to be "traffic wonks," Walker says, or a wonks of any kind.   Now whether Lees is a bald-faced liar, or simply someone who doesn't actually read the stuff he represents to the media, I won't say. I will, however mention this:  He linked London's congestion to bike lanes--which are not mentioned anywhere in the 21-page report.

Now, I have all sorts of issues with bike lanes, at least as they exist in too many places.  I've ridden too many, especially here in New York, that are poorly conceived, designed, constructed and maintained.  They don't provide practical or safe routes for transportation cycling:  Few link to other bike (or bikeable) routes or to places where significant numbers or would-be cycle commuters study, work or shop.  But any traffic congestion--including that of Crescent Street in Astoria, where I live--existed before bike lanes were built.

Misinformation, whether or not it's intended as such, can cause people to believe things that are demonstrably false and act in irrational ways, especially when it's amplified by folks with actual or metaphorical microphones.  So, in that sense, what leads folks to think that bike lanes cause traffic congestion is basically the same as what causes them to believe their candidate had an election "stolen" from him.

  

The Girl Puzzle

Yesterday I managed to sneak in a ride before sunset.  It wasn't long, but it took me to familiar haunts I hadn't ridden in a while:  a few loops around Roosevelt Island.

It's probably been a couple, maybe a few, months since I last took a spin on the island.  However long it was, enough time had passed to see something new:

 

Actually, it's been under wraps for a while.  It was supposed to be unveiled last year, but the COVID pandemic delayed that, and other things.  

The "Girl Puzzle" installation is an homage to Nellie Bly, a pioneering journalist.  Next year will mark the centennial of her death:  two years after she, and other American women, won the right to vote. 

In a way, it's appropriate that the installation stands before the lighthouse, as she shed light on all sorts of terrible, scandalous and interesting situations.  One of them prevailed at the other end of the island, in its now-closed sanitorium.  As flimsy as this country's mental health care system is, it was much worse in her day.

She was able to write an expose of it--which morphed from a series of articles into a book (Ten Days In A Mad House)--and much of her other work by going under cover.  That, of course, makes it ironic that the installation is by the lighthouse.  Perhaps equally ironic is that she was able to go undercover at a time when she was conspicuous simply by being a woman doing paid work, let alone journalism.  Then again, her first published work, in the Pittsburgh Dispatch, was a response to a previously-published misogynistic complaint about female wage-earners.

The title of that piece was..."The Girl Puzzle." While it garnered complaints and other negative reactions, the editor realized her potential and had her write more pieces.  Soon after, he hired her as a full-time reporter.

Although women in professions like journalism have become the norm, we still have to solve "The Girl Puzzle":  How do we--whatever our gender identities, however we express them--realize our potential and our dreams while remaining true to ourselves and dealing with those who try to enforce their notions of what men or women, boys or girls, should be?  

As I looked at "The Girl Puzzle," I couldn't help but to think about Simone Biles and the other female gymnasts who, yesterday, reached a settlement against their sport's governing bodies in their case against their coach--and abuser.  It sounds like a story Nellie Bly would have covered--and been appalled that she had to at this late date.