Local heroes
There's been a boom in women/trans/non-binary-led bike groups in the last three years. Who are they, and why has it taken this long for them to come together?
I don’t know why I ever worried that people wouldn’t show up for the Inside Out sessions in Edinburgh. This weekend just past, we had the cycling events – an onstage discussion, and then a bike ride, with Jenny Graham and Kate Rawles – and they were both completely sold out.
I spent Sunday morning riding around Edinburgh with 32 new friends – all sorts of cyclists, on all sorts of bikes – and realised that there was one element of this project that I hadn’t considered, which is that Edinburgh is one of the best cities in the UK in which to get outdoors. The city is draped across an ancient volcanic landscape, and there are numerous hills to escape into, often mere minutes from busy roads, shops and theatres. Towards the end of yesterday’s outing we paused at the top of Calton Hill, and looked back at the coastline we had followed earlier in the ride, with the Firth of Forth and the blue hills of Fife, stretching out beyond it.
Last week’s hike took us into the cleft between Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags, where we could easily imagine ourselves much further from civilisation than we were. Quite a few of the people who joined us had come from outside Edinburgh – one from as far away as Georgia in the US – and it occurred to me that, as well as enabling them to chat with the authors in far more depth than they would ever manage at the end of a signing queue, we were giving them the opportunity to locate themselves geographically, which might have happened less readily had they just stumbled from station to hotel, and between all the different tourist attractions and festival venues.
Our outdoor sessions are all planned and led by people with in-depth local knowledge – and they seem as happy about sharing it with the festival-goers as the rest of us are to be shown round this spectacular city. Yesterday’s route, which kept us almost entirely on bike paths and quiet back streets, had been plotted by Queens of Pain: a local women-trans-and-non-binary-led bike community, who also led the ride, and managed to keep a large group of very varied cyclists together, happy, chatting and enjoying themselves.
I was really pleased to get to work with Queens of Pain on this, because I’d been wanting to hang out with them ever since I gave a talk in Edinburgh last year, and lots of them turned up. We all went to the bar afterwards, but I was verbally and socially exhausted after my talk, and they were all too shy to come up and start the conversation, so I left feeling that I’d missed out on making some new friends, and hoped that I’d get to come back before too long, and hang out with this cool group of likeminded riders.
We didn’t have communities like this back in my day, you see. Which is not to say there weren’t women around, or that cycling communities didn’t exist – because they did, and I benefitted from them enormously. But things have changed in recent years. Back in 2008, when I spent a lot of my time on the London Fixed Gear and Single Speed forum,[1] a common narrative was that men who were very into cycling would appeal for advice, as they were trying to convince their reluctant female partner to join them in their hobby.
The advice (as well-meaning as the request that prompted it) would normally be to turn bike rides into date nights: make sure her bike’s in good working order (or lend her one of yours); pick somewhere nice to ride to, and have coffee en route; wait for her on the hills; buy her some nice new cycling clothes so that she feels good about herself; have some wine in the fridge for when you get home.
There was nothing particularly wrong with any of this, but most of the time it just didn’t work.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Unfinished Journeys to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.