imogen binnie
It took me a couple decades to figure it out, but I was already trans in 1986. I just didn't know back then that being trans was a thing. All I really knew was shame, and maybe guilt.
This isn't about being trans. I transitioned a long time ago and the last thing I want to talk about is gender. This is about bikes. Although I guess it's about bodies, too.
Almost forty years later, I'm a therapist. I think about bodies a lot.
The film Rad came out in 1986. It tells the story of small-town paperboy Cru Jones, a BMX enthusiast whose dream is to race on the epic Helltrack - a prestigious, groundbreaking new kind of race 'that combines the different styles and skills of BMX racers and freestylers'. In order to do so, however, he has to surpass the under-handed trickery of sleazy businessman Duke Best and his minions; win over his mother, who believes strongly that choosing Helltrack over his college entrance exams is a self-destructive choice; and beat the effortless talent and skill of professional BMX rider Bart Taylor, played by 1984 Olympic gymnastics champion Bart Conner.
When Rad is remembered by film critics, it is not remembered fondly. It has a green splat from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
But I was seven. This was the VHS era, and the peak of BMX as a fad. We rented Rad over and over. We looked up to Cru, and also to Christian, the female BMX rider who teaches Cru to love (and to do flips).
The kids on my block in the woods of New Jersey all rode BMX bikes. We grew up on quiet streets, with woods to explore, a terrifying stretch of active train tracks, and a big pile of old-fashioned wooden shutters with faded yellow lead paint flaking off them that a neighbour said we could have.
We used those shutters to recreate Helltrack as best we could. We built ramps. You'd put a piece of firewood down at one end, lay the shutter on top of it at an angle, and launch yourself into the air.
I was four feet tall, probably weighed fifty pounds, and jumping six inches into the air from a broken shutter and a hunk of firewood felt like flight. Like freedom. Like power.
Like a body was the best thing in the world you could have.
I'm sure you know about the fight or flight response - the state of alert that our nervous systems go into when threatened. You may or may not be aware that, as time has gone on, two more F's have been added. Now it's fight, flight, freeze and fawn. Fawn is about flattering and caretaking the people around you to keep yourself safe.
I landed on freeze. I got stuck there.
I wasn't abused or anything, but our bodies don't differentiate between Big Trauma and Little Trauma. They just fight. Or fly. Or freeze.
I don't remember a lot from my childhood, but I do remember trying to watch a children's cartoon called Jem and the Holograms in secret. If you're not familiar with it, it's about an all-woman New Wave band fronted by a pink-haired singer and the very slightly edgier also all-woman New Wave band who try to kill them.
I didn't have a lot of time to myself at age six. It was difficult to watch cartoons without being noticed. But I did everything I could to absorb whatever brief seconds of that half-hour long, neon-coloured pop-music toy commercial I could. I knew that I wanted to, and I knew that I wasn't supposed to want to. As a kid, I felt this way about pretty much everything - if I wanted something, it was probably not OK to want it, so it wasn't worth acknowledging to myself or anyone else. So I froze.
Except when I was jumping off shutters on an imaginary Helltrack.
Blumhouse made a film adaptation of Jem and the Holograms in 2015. Don't believe the green splats on Rotten Tomatoes. It was great.
There was puberty. There was teenage drug abuse, there were romantic relationships I didn't know how to be in because I didn't know how to want anything without freezing up in shame. I kept a lid on it. Physically, if not emotionally, I attended college. Then I moved to New York City.
There were more relationships I didn't know how to be in. Drug abuse evolved into alcohol abuse, just because it was easier. I played in bands because I liked bands, I worked in bookstores because I liked books, but actual, vulnerable desire remained impossible.
My memory of my years in New York is pretty sporadic, but I sort of remember that there was another puberty.
Transition is often framed as the thing you do that solves all your problems - 'then I was finally a woman and I lived happily ever after' - but that framework ignores everything we actually know about trauma, nervous systems, bodies and minds.
I had been white knuckling my whole life, dissociated from the shame I had not yet figured out how to engage with. Transitioning didn't change any of that. Anxiety is in large part a habit, a cycle of thought and action and then thought again. Depression is the same. So is shame. The things we do to make these afflictions bearable, they become habits too. And habits don't just disappear because we want them to.
I don't remember specifics, but at some point I went home to my mom's house for a couple days, and when I came back to New York I brought my old BMX bike with me.
As a therapist, I believe strongly that we all have an innate drive to feel better, to heal. Our trauma histories and habits can co-opt that drive, though: generally, into short-term distress relief. I don't remember why I decided to bring that bike back with me - probably something to do with a memory of feeling cool on it combined with the fact that bike commuting could take money from my scant subway fare budget and put it into my forty-ounce beer bottle budget - but looking back, I think it was that innate drive to heal, to grow, like the weed that somehow pops through the cement of the sidewalk, doing its thing.
I don't remember what happened to that bike, which I must have got as a teen. Maybe it was stolen? The important thing is that soon some friends found me an ancient, heavy, blue twelve-speed.
I have a very clear memory of the first time I rode that bike from Brooklyn to work in Manhattan. I remember carrying it awkwardly down three flights of stairs from my apartment, getting on it and starting slowly, tentative and wobbly, down quiet residential Hart Street. I remember the cold air on my face, the opposite of the muggy heat on the train. I remember feeling like . Can I just do this? Can I just be out here, in the world, in the air? Can I take up space this way? Can I trust cars not to kill me?
I remember turning, terrified, onto Broadway, one of the big arterial streets.
In that part of Brooklyn, there are bodegas and squat apartment buildings on either side of the street, just like anywhere else, but the subway runs along Broadway above you. Between that bridge and the buildings, there are only a few minutes of the day when the sun makes it to the street. It's kind of depressing. It feels like being inside all day. And I guess I wasn't often there at that point in the morning, because I remember very clearly that the sun was shining down on me through that bright sliver of sky as I waited for the light to change.
I didn't have gloves on. I must have just kept my hands in my pockets when I walked to the train, but outside in the air, I remember that my hands were cold and dry. I remember thinking that I would have to get gloves.
I doubt there were cobblestones, but it felt like there were. The street was awful. I remember how deep the potholes were, far deeper than the potholes anywhere else I'd lived. I remember realising that they would actually matter now, could affect me. I couldn't just ride over or through them. I'd fall, or blow a tyre, or bend a wheel.
I had a deeply unfamiliar sense of vulnerability. I'd spent most of my life safe in an elaborate system of defences against shame, fear and grief. But in this moment a pothole could kill me. Or a bus. Even an unpredictable pedestrian, or anyone so maniacal that they'd drive a car in New York City.
The kind of safety I was used to was about not having a body. Disappearing. But here I couldn't help but take up space. I existed.
I remember that first light changing. I remember being worried about the cars I was riding near, and then being surprised by a corresponding feeling - no, I do get to take up space - and an unexpected sense of power.
I don't know if I'd felt power like that before.
I had a body. I was present in it. It could do things.
These cars could watch the fuck out for me.
Riding a...
