This year, I don’t remember much about racing at Charm City Cross. Most of my memories are standing with a sign in the race I should have been doing, shuffling myself to and fro trying to make sure the sign was in the sightline of the GCN cameras (but not blocking the racers!) as the race came by me. 

I know that many people decided to skip the UCI races this year in protest of the ban on trans women competing. However, numbers are down so much in cyclocross in America, it’s hard to tell who didn’t come because of the ban on trans women, who didn’t come because they’ve taken up gravel, who didn’t come because races are now $60-70 a pop, who didn’t come because they’re just over the gear and the wet and the cleaning and the whole cyclocross thing. 

I wanted the UCI to know I was there, and that I thought their exclusionary policies sucked. Bike racing is about tactics, and my chosen tactic for UCI cyclocross was visibility. GCN has committed to televising all of the USCX series, and there is no better way to tell the UCI what I think of their exclusionary policies than the live-streamed feed of the race that is excluding people.

I want to be clear that I am placing the blame squarely with the UCI here—I know that this policy came down in late July, and the USCX promoters were at that point pretty locked in to their races for 2023. I love cyclocross. I especially love Charm City Cross. One of my favorite things in all of life is to race my bike, have a snack, then cheer for my favorite professional racers doing the same course I just did. At Charm, I got to do that while holding a sign that said Trans Women Belong Here. My friends were there. They were also holding signs. We fanned out, looking for cameras, choosing tactically to stand right in front of them. It worked! We were definitely on the feed. Of course, I’m not actually sure many people watch American cyclocross on GCN, so I can’t be sure that many people saw it.

However, it made me feel like for two days, I said something. I made clear to the UCI how I feel about their policies. But with a few weeks between then and now, I’m not so sure it was enough. I don’t know what enough is, though I do know it has to be a lot bigger than me and my friends. I do think that the UCI will only listen if we are loud. If we are in their face. If we make the men who make decisions there take notice of how we feel because we make it a point to be on TV, be in photos, be constantly in their vision. 

That is after all how we got here. The anti-trans brigade was everywhere for about two years. It was annoying, and despite having perfectly reasonable, workable policies that had allowed trans women to race for years without incident (and, I have to add, without many wins and certainly without dominance), the UCI clearly changed the rules so that the annoying TERFs would shut up.* Practically, I don’t see how we gain back the rights that we lost without making it impossible to watch, attend, participate in bike racing without seeing and hearing us talk about who has been excluded. As much as people don’t want to show up to races that exclude, that is where the eyes of the men in power are and any strategy looking to make political change has to reckon with that. 

This is something that I will continue to grapple with as I cling to what’s left of cyclocross in the Northeast. My presence at any race is political—though given the constant inequalities in women’s cycling it has been since I showed up to my first crit in 2008. First and foremost, I want to make sure to support the races that are purposefully inclusive. But I also want to show up to the races that exclude and make sure as many people as possible know who isn’t there and why. I hope that more people think about both strategies as we move forward and don’t give the UCI (or USAC) the opportunity to forget that excluding trans women is discrimination.

To quote one of our sibling CRCA teams: “What tactic is this?”

And perhaps more importantly, is it working?

*The rule change was accompanied by no science or change in thinking. It was in my opinion clearly about making Save Women’s Sports go away by giving them what they wanted.

(TBD also had a great weekend of racing our bikes!)