Am I the first to see the similarity? I'd be interested to find out.
As you are aware, I ride a bike for transport, have done all my life and the time I spent living anywhere but in the Netherlands have on many journeys had my life threatened as a cyclist, both intentionally and simply by being in the way.
In the Netherlands cycling is funded and defended as a form of transportation and segregation is the main tool used to keep cyclists safe from faster, heavier vehicles such as cars and lorries. It is also supported legally - for the most part, the driver of the faster, heavier vehicle is considered to bare the majority of the responsibility for their behaviour on the road.
Gay rights in the Netherlands are just as vulnerable as in the UK. The Netherlands is known for being a tolerant country, but only recently, male politicians made a stand by publicly holding hands to support the right for two homosexuals to openly hold hands in public places without having the life kicked out of them. We still need Gay Pride marches.
I am also a woman, a heterosexual woman, married with two children. I am a couple of inches taller than my husband, I open the jars in our house, and we share the DIY tasks according to who is better - he has a degree in electrical engineering so electrics, he's also much better at shelves, setting up PC's and IT related things. I maintain our bikes, the garden - including building stuff like planters, a bbq etc. I am the bbq lighter and maintainer. We share the cooking, I specialise more in oven related dishes and use more tools and stuff like the pressure cooker, whereas he tends to prefer the Wok and makes much better rice than I can.
I have a reasonable collection of shoes, including several pairs of Doctor Martens, birkenstocks, ballet pumps, court shoes, dancing shoes, walking shoes etc. He usually has two or three pairs of shoes on the go.
I have a huge collection of records and music, I am the music geek, but my husband has arguably more music, all on his harddrive and a very large collection of board games.
We share the cleaning, and he does most of the laundry. I do more childcare because our children are gifted autistic which makes them quite a handful. Having said that, he does lots of gaming with them, which they love, both made up D&D style, board games, Live Role Playing and online/computer based with them, so it's far from one sided.
Some of our attributies are considered "gender typical" others not so. I am keen that my children, both boys, grow up with the idea that anything they want to do, providing they are not hurting anyone, is fair game. I have not pushed them towards or away from anything based on their sex. If you don't need genitals to do it, it's fair game.
What I have noticed in the past decade or so, is that in my country of birth, the UK, the marginalisation of sexual preferences other than heterosexual has decreased, which in turn has meant that, quite rightly, the idea that who you choose to have sex with or spend your life with, have children and leave all your possessions to, is largely your business. Providing you don't hurt anyone, they are old enough to consent and they have indeed, consented without fear for themselves or someone they care about, you are within the law.
These laws and norms have all been heading towards making sure that you can prevent people from being taken advantage of, excluded, persecuted or harmed because of their choices and preferences within the framework of protecting everyone from discrimination, overt or covert.
At the same time, transportation has been evolving too. The bike, once a symbol of feminism and equality - in the early 20th Century it sped up the changes in women's clothing norms - allowing women to wear trousers and move around freely.
The car, once a man's toy, also became adopted as a means of freedom for many - being able to drive is a liberation of mobility. You can travel anywhere, anytime of the day or night in safety.
Public transportation has always had mixed reviews as far as safe mobility for women is concerned and the loss of guards on trains and conductors on busses was not a great move in the context of feeling safe travelling alone. This coincided with the increase of cars on the road, the one getting easier and safer, the other becoming prohibitively dangerous alone.
All the way through this obviously, the better off you are financially, the less impact the bad sides have and the benefits increased too. Although being able to afford a taxi doesn't mean your taxi driver doesn't turn out to be a serial rapist, but that's another can of worms.
Cycling among all this, since the increase in motorised transportation, with its associated advantages and disadvantages has changed dramatically. With fast busy roads and little provision for cyclists, the act of riding a bike for a woman or a child has been actively discouraged, you could say. At best cyclist have been driven to the pavements where they are also universality hated.
A tiny percentage of women in the UK ride bikes. Why? it's over half the cycling population in the Netherlands.
We know why, because it's both perceptually dangerous, and actually dangerous. It requires a "masculine" amount of bloody minded determination and stamina.
Among cycling activists, I am in a minority, as a transport cyclist and woman. I am there to support the idea that cycling should be available as a means of transportation on public roads and that the infrastructure that is paid for by taxation should provide equally for all road users. Not, as it now stands, heavily subsidising and preferring motorised private transportation. I am not alone, but it's a less well supported cause than even say, gay rights. It barely gets mentioned, and features more victim blaming, a very similar way to rape and sexual harassment.
Only half the population drive, if you count children and the elderly and disabled, yet they are forced to become reliant on drivers because all other means are expensive, dangerous, far slower (public transportation have to adhere to much stricter safety regs than cars, not to mention they aren't as well subsidised) and not made as readily available. You can buy fuel 24 hours a day, but few places provide 24 hour public transport.
Spend any time in the Netherlands and you will be passed in the street by disabled people mobilising themselves in ways that in the UK just can't be done because the infrastructure isn't there. You can't hand cycle along a major A-road, with no pavement and there's often no other route.
In the Netherlands, at any time, over half the Men, women and children of all ages, ethnicity, and social standing use bikes for short journeys, journeys that would all mostly undertaken by car in towns and cities around the UK. Not because of hills, because it's not laid out do do so, you don't exist, unwelcome on the road and the pavement. Look at the huge uptake in London for cycling infrastructure. But what about the rest of the UK? If you live outside of a major town or city transport poverty is a large, under represented problem.
Twitter is ablaze with outrage as racing cyclists frighten horses, while drivers routinely injure and kill both horses and riders on the roads. The stats are shocking. But it remains, cycling is the only form of racing allowed on public roads.
This "cycling" movement, backed sometimes furiously by advocates of cycling as a whole, is no different to the advocates of Lesbian and Gay rights. Both issues occupy a huge amount of twitter traffic, emotions fly and threats, insults or anger are common.
Both causes are populated by mostly well meaning people. But are they actually led by a significant minority of predominantly white, privileged men, who are hijacking these good causes for their own ends? They don't care about how it effects others, they are in fact if anything just as likely to prefer it if the people who are being hurt or having their freedoms taken away, just shut up and get back in our places; out of their way.
There is a surprising link between racing cyclists and a significant amount of men who identify themselves as women. What a strange link!
Racing cycling is worth a fortune in the UK, it's not by any means just a male obsession, I love a good road bike, but it is mostly a male sport. It is not saving the planet, bike races involve as many cars as there bikes and just as the bikes are travelling round in circles, so are the cars. There's nothing nobel or special about it. It's a sport, like any other. The only thing it has in common with me on my bike coming home from the shops, is we both have two wheels, a frame, pedals etc.
As for what we are doing and why, we are worlds apart, in fact, he has impacted me, because if it were up to him, I wouldn't exist. When he goes shopping, he wants to do it by car. He will vote for people who want to it by car and he will support being able to travel by car. For him, his bike is a toy, a plaything, not his main means of transportation. In fact, it can only carry him. I don't see Alan Sugar campaigning for the right for children to ride to school safely just because he's got a 2 grand racing bike.
The fashion for cycling as a sport is no more good for the planet or the human race than the fashion for saying that a man who chooses to dress as woman, is, if he chooses to say so, a woman.
Grayson Perry, he says he's a man, I like him. In fact I very much admire him. Be like Grayson, he's got the idea, he's also got at least one lovely bike, and he rode it to work in a dress. That's more like it.
What's the harm if he does? None.
But what's happening on the quiet, in the Green Party, in the Labour Party, all over politics is not. It's the insistence that they have to silence anyone who questions the idea that wearing a dress makes you a woman. There has been an exodus of women who are thrown out for questioning men who identify as women taking women's jobs from political parties.
That you can feel like a woman, that's nonsense. How do you know what it feels like to be a woman? What does that feel like? It doesn't exist. Your sex is biology. It's not blue or pink. Acting like a woman is not being a woman, anymore than acting like a tree or acting like a dog.
Lesbian and Gay rights has been piggy backed by men who identify as women to infiltrate into positions designed to advocate women's rights. It's allowing a man to compete in a women's sporting event, it's allowing a man to do time in a women's prison and in the process coerce vulnerable women who are lesbians into having sex with a man because he's convinced you he's actually a woman. Women have now raped, it's in the statistics! Yet you need a penis to rape someone.
It's a male policeman who identifies as a woman legally allowed to to body search a female detainee. It's supported by religious organisations who don't recognise homosexuality to encourage, even force homosexual men to become women. It's feeding body dysphoria and self hatred, so rather than learning to love yourself, you change your biology, spend all your money on surgery. That's just the tip of the iceberg, because elsewhere in the world it's much much darker.
I touched upon religion and homosexuality, all over the developing world homosexuals are being marginalised more by insisting that "gender" being "feminine" or "masculine" is more than just an idea. It's not fixed, it's cultural. It's not biology, it's ideology. Do we want to live in a future where if you are gay, you have to have corrective surgery and hormone treatment to be accepted by society? Do we want to indulge the fetish of powerful men who like to feel as "helpless" as a woman? Do we want to encourage "femininity" to mean demure, pretty, weak, vulnerable?
This all sounds way worse than a bunch of blokes in lycra, what harm are they doing? Well no actually they are also part of the taking away of freedom for the rest of us, women, children, men and women who are not at the peak of sexual, financial, mental health. If you are not strong enough, fast enough, brave enough to hold your own with vehicles, you shouldn't be there?
This is the same issue; the systematic trickle away from equality, back towards a world where male and the man is dominant, the strongest prevail. The roads, our transportation systems are a symptom of this as much as anywhere.
I might be white, I might be heterosexual, but as a woman, I challenge anyone who tries to take away a person's right to be a feminine man or a masculine woman. I challenge the "cycling community" to ask themselves who benefits from supporting cycling as a sport in order to promote cycling for transport? You are not helping, and until your event involves a mass charity ride laden with shopping, children and disabled people with hand cycles and electric wheelchairs, you are just part of the privileged few. Fine, go for your ride, but don't for one second think you are saving the environment or changing the world for the better.
I'm conflicted. I have a racing bike, I like Krafwerk! and my beloved niece is becoming my nephew. I don't for a minute want to stop him or take away his right to live as he chooses. But we must make sure that freedom of speech and freedom of movement aren't taken away from us to satisfy a tiny minority of narcissistic, greedy, over privileged men. If that means drawing the line somewhere, make it low, make it simple and make it fair.
If it doesn't work for women, if it doesn't protect children, if it doesn't respect diversity, it doesn't work for anyone.
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