FIXED UP - A TERRIBLE IDEA from F U L F R A M E on Vimeo.

https://cyclingtips.com/2020/05/everesting-on-a-fixie-with-a-hormone-headwind/

On November 14th 2018, I gleefully bunny-hopped and manualed my dirt jump bike home from the pharmacy, my first box of estrogen patches in my back pocket. Finally, I was one small step closer to freedom from a body and self in which I had grown unbearably uncomfortable. This decision (to medically transition) came after no small amount of self-questioning, denial, dysphoria, talks with therapists, and depression, which, without the stabilizing force of bikes and the lovely people who ride them, would likely have derailed my college career.

Transitioning would signal the end of my ability to “just race.” Either I could continue racing in men’s categories (i.e. not as my true self, but in the same thin disguise I’ve been trying my hardest to strip off these past few years), and resign myself to worse and worse finishes as hormone replacement therapy (HRT) worked its magic, or I could enter the women’s field, and have any half-decent result tainted by the assumption that I retained some unfair advantage. Neither of these options particularly appealed to me.

It had been nearly two years since, drunk in our motel at Hartford Cyclocross Nationals, I came out to my friends Sammy and Matt; and a little bit longer since, at a University of Vermont cycling team Halloween party, I had first experimented with presenting femme. As much as I leaned on this sport throughout my coming out, it was also the main reason for my reluctance to transition. Bike racing had been an important part of my life ever since I started racing BMX the summer after fifth grade. In subsequent years, I delved into dirt jumping, MTB, road, cyclocross, tracklocross, and countless alleycats. Bikes are part of me.

The alleycats and tracklocross races that appealed most to me had more nuanced gender categories than USAC’s (“open” and “WTFNB” instead of the strict men/women binary), and Everesting is only a competition against my own ideas of what was possible.


Viem ze toto je uplne niche, ale velmi sympaticky spraveny film, ktoremu kontext a celkovy pribeh dodava hlbku.
Charli Mandel | @gnarli_cxc | Strava log

(boze mvoj, 48/17, na tom jazdim po meste)