Cyclings Needed Abolition Movement

image via @t_seplavy

Like many of you, I kept pulse of this weekends CX Worlds in Arkansas in light of last years debates and anti-trans bills. It got me thinking about the hard conversations we hold at the zine and why we need to continue to talk about how racing is a cop and cycling needs an abolitionist movement.

For 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, but also racing and it’s governing bodies.

Despite the powerful and destructive impacts of neoliberal ordering of streets and sport culture, there are and always have been radical politics and movements to challenge the exploitation that streets and sports are founded upon.

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 in cycling movement because many gain validation through it but maybe wrestling with such a significant demand is the 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 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. It may not address Arkansas in this moment but with more than half of the US considering forms of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation, we should consider that our states can be a battle ground for these civil rights, as they have been since George Floyd uprisings.

Perhaps creating safe spaces in cycling is the work we can do along with supporting our local pro-lgbtqia organizations.

For cyclists advocating on these issue though, even our most "well-intentioned" strategies and movements will reproduce the prison industrial complex's norms of transphobic, misogynist, and racist sexualized violence. So I encourage even the well intentioned cishet and white activists that 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’s lgbtqia organizations and activism and how they coopt and undermine the work of Black trans movements.

And perhaps I’ve now become skeptical of the revolutionary potential of cycling as I see a shift in terms of resistance from revolution and transformation to inclusion and reform. Cycling loves its heroes and their narratives but thankfully they are not the end of the story.