What the Gravel Community Can Learn from the Trans Community (an incomplete list) Part 1
Last week I spent 5 days in Emporia, KS for the crown jewel of gravel racing, Unbound Gravel. This weekend was completely incredible. I got the opportunity to rub elbows with industry leaders and pro athletes, and spent a lot of time soaking up a surprising amount of queer community (truly, my favorite part of any gravel event). But there was something that continued to irk me in little and big ways my entire time in The Sunflower State.
As most people who’ve been in gravel know, many of the now major races started as grass-roots events in very rural, small-town areas by mostly white, middle-class cisgender people. Given this fact, it’s easy to understand that these events were not conceived with a greater sense of cultural sensitivity, and many of the events were named things that were later revealed to the organizers to be problematic, unwelcoming, and in some cases downright harmful to folks of marginalized identities, specifically indigenous people.
I’m happy to report that, although it may have taken too long, many of these races have been renamed, Unbound included. But what kept coming up over the weekend, especially, and most notably at the Gravel Hall of Fame induction ceremony, was that Unbound and The Mid South (two of the largest and most prestigious gravel events in the world) were continually referred to by their offensive and problematic former names.
When a trans person changes their name, it is not a process undergone lightly. For most trans folks their given name or deadname is a source of much pain and dysphoria. You do not deadname folks. End of story. When referring to a trans person, even when you refer to a time in their life before they transitioned, you always use their correct name, never their deadname. When you meet a trans person, their former name is irrelevant, you don’t need to know it, you certainly never need to use it. Because using a person’s deadname shows that you still see them as something they’re not, a gender they aren’t. It says in so many words that you are unwilling to change and see this person as who they truly are, and this is harmful.
And this is a lesson that the gravel community should take to heart.
The use of these events’ deadnames is a continued reminder that the people using them do not care about the harm they are causing. If these former names were so problematic and harmful they needed to be changed, why are these higher-ups in the gravel world (sometimes even the event organizers and promoters themselves) still using the old names—even if just in reference? To change the name of the event, but still use the old name is a perfect example of performative allyship—changing something on the outside, when the inside stays the same. Any use of these names only perpetuates their harm. I would like to personally and collectively challenge everyone who finds themselves in the gravel cycling world to refuse to deadname these events and leave these harmful and unwelcoming terms long in the past, as they have no place in gravel’s future.
Names and language, while very important, are still only a beginning and should be a gateway to truly reparative and healing action and accountability. But what does it say about us as a community if we aren’t even willing to get to the start line?