Queerness Comes for the Cycling Club

In 2021 I made some new friends

I’m on vacation this week and so are you! Today’s post isn’t about law or history. It’s about a bike club I joined in 2021. All names have been changed.

In 2020 I went insane from lockdown and decided I’d been living my life all wrong. I quit the hobbies I’d been beavering away at for years – Spanish classes, Democratic Socialists of America organizing. I even decided to stop reading books. Any activity that involved thinking was kryptonite, it disgusted me. I wanted to become a meathead.

The sport I chose was cycling. I bought a bike in July 2020, built up my legs on the nearby hill, fell off the bike and broke my arm (September 2020), bought a racier bike (November 2020), and registered for a bike club (March 2021). An LGBT bike club, specifically, because I’m an L.

Dozens of people joined the club’s Saturday excursions into the suburbs, almost all of whom were men. But there was one woman around my age who seemed to be single, a corporate lawyer named Rachel. We rode together a few weeks in a row. 

In April a new guy shyly complimented my bike. 

At about 25 years old, Manuel was a decade younger than I was. Cycling is a middle-aged sport (you need to wake up early on Saturday mornings) so he stood out. Not only was he young, but he was wearing a black cotton crop top while the rest of us wore high-visibility lycra. I turned to compliment his bike and felt stumped – it was a junkyard frame with red paint as scuffed and faded as gum on the sidewalk. 

So I took to Manuel immediately. But Rachel did not. She looked annoyed a few hours later when I waved him over to eat lunch with us. Heartless corporate lawyer, I thought. No appreciation for weird young gay guys in crop tops. It turned out to be the last time I saw her.

Manuel lived near me so we started riding home from rides together. We also stuck together during the rides because we both liked to go off the front (the other guys went drinking on Friday nights).

I did manage to befriend one woman in the club. We took a ride just the two of us. As we carefully coasted over a narrow bridge path, two guys on high-end aero bikes ripped by me from the opposite direction. Rounding a blind corner, the one in front collided with my friend’s wheel. They accused her of denting the guy’s brake rotor and demanded she pay up. I argued with them and convinced her to follow me off the bridge. Then they wedged her against the railing – so much for my advocacy skills. She Venmo’d the reckless thug a hundred dollars to secure her freedom. The part retailed for $55.

After watching my friend get mugged by two rich guys in broad daylight, I grudgingly reconsidered my cycling habits. Maybe I shouldn’t ride through secluded areas by myself, I thought. After all, I didn’t have to take that sort of risk. Manuel was eager to explore the boonies. I’d always hated the male-escort strategy of violence prevention, just the semiotics of it. But at least Manuel was gay.

Manuel was a great companion. We hit iconic landmarks and monster hills in the furthest reaches of our metro area, sometimes catching commuter trains home because we’d ended up too far away. He had earnest brown eyes, a sly sense of humor, and he deferred completely to whatever route I planned. 

Manuel had grown up in a strict Mexican-American household and graduated from a competitive engineering school. A familiar gay type: straitlaced childhood followed by a move to the city, crop tops, and general haplessness. When he lamented his boyfriend’s mood swings and unpredictability, I considered how I might low-key persuade him to leave.

On Instagram Manuel modeled dresses he’d sewn and said his pronouns were “he/she/they/idgaf.” In all the photos he posed alone – an affectation of younger people I’ve never understood. Don’t they worry about seeming lonely?

When Manuel left town to visit his family, I checked out a different cycling club. Right away I ran into a woman I knew from the LGBT club, Marie. Another woman rolled up and asked Marie about her partner – “Dave.” Marie answered awkwardly. 

I know a gay guy who’s deep into a different LGBT sports league. He told me it’s common and accepted for straight women to join. I said it felt invasive. Lesbians are a tiny minority (about half the size of the gay male population, though increasingly hard to measure because of all the young straight and gay women who identify as “queer”). I want to have one place I can go and just assume when I talk to a woman that she has this obscure trait in common with me. And to be rude about it, straight women are a dime a dozen. The time I wasted talking to Marie I could’ve spent getting to know a gay person.

“I don’t mind including straight women,” my gay male informant said. “I think it’s great. They shouldn’t have to train with straight men.”

Manuel and I kept up our rides deep into the fall, even met up on a flukey warm day over the winter. In the spring of 2022 we rejoined the LGBT club. Over lunch one day he dropped that his troublesome boyfriend was trans. Poor Manuel, I thought. Doesn’t he realize he’s cute enough for a real boyfriend? But that does explain why the guy’s name is Nigel …

At that point I wasn’t a hardcore TERF. The censoriousness of trans activists repelled me but I didn't let it affect my view of individual trans people. I thought there probably were flaws in youth gender medicine and I never gave adult gender medicine a passing thought.

Manuel dating a trans man seemed of a piece with him riding a decrepit bicycle that made his hands numb because it was too big. Kid needed to get his act together.

That year I connected with some (straight) women who also thought trans was sus. It motivated me to dig deeper. My buddies needed me to help crack this case. As a first step, I decided to steel man the trans position that rights should be based on gender identity rather than sex.

But I couldn’t find any steel. Not one single scrap. Whenever I came across a promising rod, I’d inspect it and discover it was straw.

On my rides with Manuel I started to feel two-faced whenever dating came up. I was acting friendly and supportive but thinking EXPLAIN TO ME WHY TRANS ISN’T CRAZY!

Manuel’s stories weren’t helping. Nigel had opened up their relationship so “he” could explore “his” trans-guy identity by dating other trans guys. Manuel was totally supportive. At Nigel’s suggestion, he was courting a trans woman. They went on a picnic together. Afterward Manuel wrote “her” a love song that I watched him perform on his guitar alone on Instagram.

Manuel and I started riding with another soft-spoken young engineer we’d met in the LGBT cycling club, Henry. I hoped he might peel Manuel away from Nigel. 

On a cool October afternoon we stopped in a busy park to fill our bottles. 

“How did you and Nigel meet?” I asked Manuel.

“Tinder,” he said.

“Isn’t that more for straight people?”

“Well,” he said. He laughed sheepishly. “At the time I actually thought I was straight.”

Manuel had met Nigel when Nigel was Nicole. After a month of dating, Nicole told him she was a gay man. But they didn’t have to break up, she said, because she could tell he was a gay man too.

“I am pretty fruity,” Manuel said to Henry and me. “My favorite hobbies are cooking and sewing.”

We nodded along. I didn’t fully process it. But I did feel emboldened. I told them I’d been researching gender myself and couldn’t figure out in what sense trans women were women. I thought the whole thing was bunk. Henry and Manuel looked stricken. They agreed with me that trans advocates' arguments relied heavily on emotion but so what?

“Just because trans people aren’t doing a good job articulating the case,” Henry said, “doesn’t mean they’re wrong.” 

“I think it does mean they’re wrong!”

We argued about women’s sports. At first they were snide. “You want to sacrifice trans rights for the sake of preserving sex-segregated sports?,” Manuel said. But after I delivered an impassioned speech, they agreed girls’ sports needed to be protected. I felt pleased with myself because, like I said, I didn’t actually construct a jock identity until I was 35 and had developed an allergy to books. 

I think the truth is, changing their mind wasn’t a tall order – they were eager to accommodate whatever.

The wind picked up, the park-goers swarmed around us. I kept bringing the conversation back to one point: do you guys really think trans women are women, or are you just pretending to believe that to be nice? Manuel said it was a good question; he would take it to his friends and get back to me.

In spring of 2023 I returned to the LGBT cycling club. Manuel did not.

On a beautiful April day, a bearded woman named Ted chatted me up. It’s natural for the only two women on a ride to stick together but I guess Ted didn’t see the scenario that way. Maybe she thought of us as non-men. 

I told myself to be chill. But as we talked at a rest stop I kept wrestling anxious thoughts, like, I should slouch so it’s not so obvious Ted is short.

Around that time Manuel texted me the Jon Stewart episode where he made fun of people who have concerns about pediatric gender medicine. He said the argument made sense to him but apologized that it was “from the perspective of a cis male.”

I shared the Blocked and Reported episode that takes apart the Jon Stewart episode. He didn’t respond.

Months earlier Manuel had posted a video to Instagram that included another person: he was doing a doofy dance with a girl. I don’t know if the girl was Nigel, but he was definitely into her. She was tall and flat-chested in a scrawny way, not a mastectomy way, with a pixie cut and boxy t-shirt. She didn’t look like she was on testosterone. She looked like me.