Now That I'm The "Older Woman On A Bike"...

Time was (How many posts have I started with that phrase?) back in the day (Or that?) when I could develop love interests only with people who were older than me.  Or, at least, I couldn’t get involved with people who were younger than I was.

Anyway, I was describing my old dilemma, if you will, to a friend.  She sighed knowingly.  “I understand how you feel,” she said.  “The young ones look good.  But finding one with whom you have much in common is difficult.”

“Forget that,” I retorted.  “I’m getting to an age where there are fewer and fewer people who are older than I am.”

She laughed.  “And, you know, when you look for men who are available and don’t have baggage, the pool shrinks even more,” she added.

I didn’t tell her that I wouldn’t limit my prospects to men.  If I can find a woman close to my age with whom I’m compatible, I could make the rest of it work, I think.

Why am I talking about these things?  Well, I found myself thinking about my concept of “older” the other day while riding home.  What triggered such a rumination?  

While riding to work, I saw two women who, from all appearances, were in the later stages of middle age. (No, they're not the ones in the photo!) One rode a Cannondale road bike with dropped bars; the other pushed pedals on a Specialized hybrid or flat-bar road bike.  Both looked as if they were dressed from the Terry catalogue.  Then, during my bike ride home, I saw a woman who seemed a few years older than the two women I encountered earlier. 

She could have been a poster child for the AARP.  Her scarf very stylishly swirled a pastel paisley between her neck and breasts; her pants and blouse were tailored but un-self-conscious.  She was navigating the streets on what looked like a French mixte of some sort:  I couldn’t see the brand, but I knew it wasn’t Peugeot, Motobecane, Gitane, Ficelle or any of the other Gallic marques I know.

Then, as I dismounted my bike in front of my place, I saw a woman riding an English three-speed down my street.  That itself was not as remarkable as that she was, apparently, older than the other women I saw by at least a decade.  What’s more, she looked as if she’d been living in the neighborhood all of her life.  If that is part of her story, she is probably Greek or Italian (She looked the part) and, most likely, the wife of a blue-collar or middle-class worker.

Time was (There’s that phrase again!), not so long ago, when a woman like her would not be on a bicycle.  Nor would her husband or any other member of her family old enough to drive.  For that matter, I would not have seen women like the others I mentioned.  

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, when I was in my late twenties and thirties, I could ride the whole length of Vernon Boulevard, near where I live now, cross the Pulaski Bridge and ride down Kent Avenue and further along the Brooklyn side of the East River and New York Bay without seeing another cyclist.  Back then, most of the neighborhoods were blue-collar or lower middle-class, except for some then-low-income areas of Williamsburg and Sunset Park.  The culture of those places was much like that of the neighborhoods in which I grew up:  You simply didn’t ride a bicycle if you were old enough to drive a car, whether or not you actually drove one.

 

Furthermore, those rare adult cyclists I encountered were all male.  Most were close to my age; occasionally, I’d pass one who were older than my parents.  Usually, such an older male cyclist was an immigrant who never gave up the habit, so to speak, after settling in the New World.  But I never saw a female cyclist unless I rode into a neighborhood like Brooklyn Heights or the Upper East Side or out of the city into a suburban enclave.  The few I saw weren’t commuting or running errands; perhaps they were riding for fitness, but most likely, just to decompress.  

It was rarer yet to see “older” women ride.  Of course, at that time, my elders were in their late thirties or older.  I recall two simply because they were so unusual:  One, who was probably in her forties and looked wore a Chanel suit and slingbacks while riding a women’s Colnago--to this day, the only one of those bikes I've ever seen.  The other rode with my bike club; she was about the same age I am now.  Even more interestingly, her husband didn’t ride.

I’m her now, minus the husband.  That is to say, I’m an “older” woman, at least in the way I used to define it.  Although I like it, I often wish I could have begun my gender transition at an earlier age so I could have lived more of my life as a woman.  Then again, given the conditions of the time, would I have grown up to be that woman I so admired on our club rides?  Or the one I saw on the Colnago?  Or one of those women “of a certain age” I used to see riding to marketplaces, to parks, to stores and offices—sometimes to their jobs—when I was living in Europe?

Yearning For A New Journey

I am itching to go to France, to Europe, again.  Actually, I really want to do what I did as recently as 2001, just before 9/11:  Buy the cheapest round-trip ticket to Paris I can find, bring my bike with me and decide where I’m going to ride once I get there.

The first time I did that, I didn’t come back for a long, long time.  (Actually, I bought an open-ended round-trip ticket to London.  Are such things still available?) I rode through the English countryside to Dover and took the ferry to Calais, from which I rode through Belgium, the Netherlands and back into France, where I stayed for as long as I could.  Other times, I pedaled to Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland or the Netherlands and back. 

When I took such trips—even the first, my first outside North America—I never felt like a tourist.  Even though my French—or, for that matter, English-- wasn’t nearly as good as I thought it was after the classes I took, I felt (with much justification, I believe) I was experiencing the countries, the cultures and all of the architecture and art I’d seen in books and classrooms in ways that those who followed trails emblazoned with American Express signs never could.

On the other hand, when I went to Prague three years ago, I knew I was a tourist.  It didn’t have anything to do with the way people treated me; for that matter, it didn’t even have to do with the fact that I knew nothing of the Czech language.  Many residents of Prague speak German—of which I know a little-- nearly as well as they speak their own language, which is not a surprise when you consider that the area’s history.  And I found it surprisingly easy to find people who spoke English, or even French.  But I stayed in a hotel and rented a bike which while, enjoyable enough to ride, was nothing like the ones I brought with me on previous trips.  In contrast, in all of my other trips, I usually stayed in hostels.  Sometimes I’d camp, and once in a while I’d stay in a pension or inexpensive hotel if the other options weren’t available or I was too tired or lost to find them—or I simply wanted to treat myself.

During the first years of my gender transition, I wasn’t thinking about taking a trip like the ones I took every other year or so.  Then, for a few years, I told myself I didn’t want to take such trips—or so I told myself—because I saw them as part of my life as a male being, which I was leaving in my past.  I also figured that I couldn’t take such trips, which I usually did alone, because I believed that travelling solo as a woman would not be safe.

But I realize that other women have taken bike or other trips by themselves.  More important, I think I still have the same ability to function on my own that I had when I was younger, and male. If anything, I can function better on my own, in part because I have a better sense of when I need to ask for help, or when I want to do things with other people.

Now I see two barriers to doing a trip like the ones I did in my youth.  One is cost.  The past few years have been more difficult for me, financially, than those years of my 20’s, 30’s and early 40’s.   Even if my income were keeping pace with the kind of money I made in those days—or if I came upon the serendipities that sometimes came my way—it would be harder to take such a trip because it’s much more expensive.  Back in the day, my biggest expense was the plane fare:  Once I got to Europe, I could live cheaply and relatively well, even when exchange rates weren’t so favorable to the dollar.  But, since the introduction of the Euro, everything has gotten much more expensive.  Europeans I know say as much.

The other is that I wasn’t in the kind of physical condition I was in those days.  Some people have told me it’s to be expected, simply because my age.  Also, more than a decade of taking hormones and my surgery left me with less physical strength and endurance than I had in those days.  Plus, as much as I love cycling, I don’t do as much of it as I did in those days. That, of course, may have something to do with my physical changes.

Still, I would love to take the sort of trip I used to take, and to experience it as the person I am now.  Some might say that’s an unrealistic hope.  But, until someone can show me that it’s empirically impossible, I’ll continue to hold out such a hope—and to do what I can to prepare for such a trip.

Pride Week

“Pride Week” has begun here in New York.  It will culminate in the march that begins in Midtown Manhattan and follows Fifth Avenue, Washington Square and Christopher Street for about two and a half miles (four km) to the Stonewall Inn, where the modern LGBT movement began.

I will be involved with two events related to “Pride” (as nearly everyone here calls it) and will most likely march.  This will be my first Pride involvement in four years.  I marched in 2009, a mere nine days before my surgery, with a group of LGBT people I know from work.  After my surgery, I distanced myself from Pride and related events, and even LGBT organizations because I felt—as so many post-op people do—that I was no longer part of the “queer” community and was, in fact, more aligned with cisgender women.

Somehow, I still feel that way.  However, I also see that my life as a woman is taking a different direction from any I could have anticipated when I was living in anticipation of my surgery.

Although I could not see myself living a life like that of Christine Jorgensen or any of the early post-op women, I still believed that I would live the life of a cisgneder heterosexual woman and would fit into society’s standards of behavior and lifestyle—if not beauty—for such women.  In that sense, my life is what I expected:  I can’t remember the last time anyone looked at me askance and, unless I reveal my history (which I don’t do unless I’ve known someone for some time or there’s some other compelling reason), people treat me as if I’m a middle-aged (or perhaps slightly younger) woman.  Even after they know about my “secret”, people treat me as the woman I am. 

Still, I came to realize that my life could not be like that of any non-transgender woman or, for that matter, like that of the man I once was or that of any other man (not that I wanted the life of a man).  Only recently, though, have I come to realize some of the reasons why this is so. 

One, of course, is the fact that I lived as long as I did as a male.  Had I begun my transition at an earlier age, as another Trinidad “alumna” did, perhaps I could have re-written my history, as Christine Jorgensen and early transsexuals were advised to do.  Had I begun to take hormones and undergone gender-reassignment surgery before my puberty (as, to my knowledge, no one in my generation did), perhaps I could have denied that I had a childhood as a male.  Then again, I’m not so sure that such a denial would have been healthy.

 

Perhaps the best analogy I can find is in the academic world in which I have worked for more than a decade.  Some become faculty members or administrators after lives that were a “straight path”:  They went to elite private schools and colleges and, perhaps, one or both parents were professors.  On the other hand, there are those who, like me are a minority:  We grew up with no concept of what being a professor meant or, perhaps, that such a job even existed.  Our parents may not have finished college, or even high school:  Perhaps they didn’t even speak the language of the country in which we were raised, went to school or became faculty members.

Members of the latter group have, in essence, two choices.  They can deny their pasts and disavow their families and other people and things from their pasts.  I’ve met people who did that:  At best, they became very cold, detached people, which in some cases helped them advance—but only to a point.  Then there are the others who simply became warped or diseased.

 

Their other choice is to find new ways to forge identities as professors, scholars and educators, and to use those experiences that seemed not to prepare them for the lives on which they embarked. Some do so by incorporating their lives (or those of someone else) as children of blue collar, immigrant or racial “minority” families, or as kids who had to grow up with gender identities or sexual orientations that didn’t mirror the ones presented to them in their schools, families, churches, or in the media or the culture at large.

Even if you have the most supportive environment, there is little about your life in the gender to which you were assigned at birth—or even in your transition from it—that actually prepares you for your new life in the gender of your mind and spirit.  This is not an indictment of the counselors, therapists and doctors who guide our transitions.  Rather, it has more to do with having come into our womanhood or manhood (or however we express our gender identities) through means for which there is no guidebook, if you will—and, in many communities, no will to prepare someone for coming into one’s own self.

 

Also, I’ve come to realize that my life as a woman is taking a different turn because, ironically, of an experience too many other women (and men) have:  An intimate partner abused me.  Other women with whom I’ve shared the experienced have given me support, and even empathy, for which I am grateful.  I’m sure that some have experienced abuse that was even more intense and destructive than mine.  However, they have not experienced something I endured in my relationship:  a partner who used my very identity, and tried to turn my sense of self, against me.  

Now, I know that far too many women have had to deal with scrutiny, skepticism and worse when they reported the abuse they endured.  Even some female police officers and medical professionals treat female victims as if they somehow lacked credibility or, worse, as if they somehow “brought on” their abuse.  But my partner used my very identity—the fact that I lived for more than four decades as male, and that I transitioned—to portray me as a sexual predator.  Well, that’s what he tried to do, anyway.  Other trans women have endured similar treatment.

My experiences with law enforcement authorities had at least one parallel with those of gay men and lesbians who endured bias crimes:  We are seen as less credible, and less worthy of the help on which other people can depend, because we “brought it on ourselves” by choosing our “lifestyles”. 

A man who wakes up every day and puts on his suit and tie, or overalls, and who mounts his wife (or girlfriend) after dinner and libations is not seen as pursuing a “lifestyle”.  Nor is the woman who puts on her pearls and pumps, or her cocktail waitress uniform and, at the end of the day, allows the man to mount her after he’s given her a dozen roses.   So why is our natural expression of ourselves so dismissed?

That I must ask such a question is the reason why—for better and worse—I cannot completely separate myself from the LGBT community, at least not yet.

An Old Riding Partner--Or Racing Rival?

"Mind if I ride your wheel?"

"No, not at all!"

He didn't realize it's the best--or, at least my favorite--question anyone has asked me in a while. It's  as good as "How old are you?  Forty?"

We'd been playing "tag" along Cross Bay Boulevard, the road that runs the length of an island in Jamaica Bay between Howard Beach and Rockaway Beach.  It's a long (about 4km) flat stretch, which makes almost anyone on a bike feel like a sprinter, at least for a few minutes.  The day was sunny, though chilly, and we were buffeted by the winds one expects at this time of year.  Still, I think both he and I felt  about ten years younger.

Actually, I felt even younger than that. A man--a trim one, who looked like he'd been riding more than I'd been--wanting to draft my wheel.  Hey, if he'd asked me, I probably would have pulled him with one hand!

Somehow he looked familiar.  He was maybe a centimeter, if that, taller than me and, as I mentioned, trimmer.  His dark beard was flecked with gray, and his fair black skin had a few small wrinkles.  I'd've guessed him to be close to my own age.  That guess would turn out to be correct.

As we talked, I couldn't help but to think we'd met--actually, ridden--together.  When I was living in Park Slope, he was living on the other side of Prospect Park, in Crown Heights.  Now he lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant.  So, naturally, we talked about riding in Prospect Park, and how we both had the "ten lap" rule:  Once we could ride that much in the park without much effort--something that would happen around this time of year, maybe a bit earlier--we'd "graduate" to longer rides outside the park,and even outside of Brooklyn or New York City.  I had a feeling I'd ridden with him on at least one of those longer rides; he had the same feeling. 

He also mentioned that he'd road-raced, around the same time I did.  Like me, he quit racing (and I also stopped riding off-road) after turning 40:  Although, ironically, I had more strength and endurance than I did 15 years earlier, my wounds weren't healing as quickly as they once did.  He also gave that as a reason for not chasing trophies, and other riders.

I rode with him for a couple of hours and, actually, off the route I'd planned to ride.  But I didn't mind:  Just as I was wondering whether I'd ever get myself into any kind of shape, ever again, he wanted to ride my wheel.  And he thought I'd been riding more than he'd been.  To be fair, I have to give at least some of the credit to Arielle:

To answer a question you might be asking:  He gave me his name (which was familiar) and told me where he works.