As a trans woman, I am terrified of what is to come in the next few years. I intend to stay who I am and not hide away. However, I've also decided not to travel out of the blue enclave where I live, fearing a chance encounter with an election-emboldened crazy. Of course, such an encounter could happen right outside my door, but the odds are lower - a little less unsafe is the most realistic goal right now. I deeply feel every word of the last paragraph of your excellent article. Thank you!
One of our Relay Iowa members is trans and I love watching her run through the fields of Iowa, taking up space, writing with her feet that she belongs here too. I am glad you have safety. You belong here and you deserve to be an unhindered body in every space you enter.
YES. And also - we may be the minority - but there are a lot of us in red states fighting hard for you. We are still here shouting for you in the spaces without you. I will never hide my support for you.
I’m 66, and my knees and feet preclude running now, but when I was in college and grad school in the 70s and early 80s, I ran regularly. In the snow and ice, I took to running inside at the Armory track, where no one ever harassed me. But the rest of the time, i ran through campus to get to a beautiful residential neighborhood. To get there, I ran past frats and across the Quad, and I got yelled at every time by boys (I refuse to call them men, though they had the heft and danger of men). Back then, women running wasn’t nearly as common, and I guess I thought it was partly the novelty that incited them, but the point is that *I* felt self-conscious, like a rule-bending freak, even though I was conscious enough to despise them, too. I thought they were reacting to some defect in my body, and I guess they were: I was a woman. I am enraged these days, about so many things, but now I’m enraged about what you, and other women, have to endure merely to feel your wonderful bodies moving through the air, the landscape under your own power. Fuck those men.
I'm 85. Last night something happened that seems to have affected my right side, where a stroke affected things nearly 3 years ago, plus skewing my vision. Whether I can work my way out of this remains to be seen. Reading your piece, shocked at what you have to endure, simply to exist as you wish, as anyone human wishes to exist, I felt as if you were running for all of us who cannot.
I started practicing law when the idea flabbergasted some men. A (male) colleague at my first lawyer job said that he had some clothes that needed tailoring: could I do it? Yes, as it happened - we girls learned sewing, by hand and machine, in regular public school, and for some years I made most of my own. clothes. But why should I? He could take it to a tailor who did it professionally. Why did Woman Lawyer = Generic Female = She who sews? So keep running Lyz, for us all. You will never know how many of us, broken now and worth little perhaps in the eyes of the world, run as fierce as lionesses beside you.
you speak for so many of us elder women. fierce as lionesses - i cherish this image. the buddhists call this 'grandmother wisdom.' we are compassionate and tough. thank you!
This just made me cry. I can exactly articulate why. I LOVE to walk. If I could, I would get everywhere by walking. Meandering in new places while traveling has always provided the best and most unexpected delights. I’ve never thought about its connection to freedom and being in the world the way you so beautifully describe here. I think my tears are for the beauty of it and because…fuck…we can’t even have this seemingly simple thing…to walk. And yet we will! Thank you for this.
It will empower me to walk with my head up and take up as much space as possible, and to not take it for granted.
Moving story. You are absolutely correct. I run and bike and have been threatened and verbally assaulted repeatedly. In Texas a white pickup with two men and a woman jerked to the side of the outer road ahead of me and the occupants starting shouting obscenities at me, calling me a liberal pig. I refuse to be frightened off my own streets, out of my own life and the things I love. If I die running or cycling, then I die living, doing the things that make me feel the most connected with the world I love. If I hide indoors, then hate wins and the most important part of me dies, but a new kind of suffering starts which goes on and on until my shell crumbles.
This made me miss running so much, although I walk as much as possible now. I’ve had stuff thrown at me, yelled, horns honked, almost hit several times (I used to yell back at cars but then I stopped because guns and road rage). This was all in suburban Atlanta.
Two things changed. One, I got a tiny rescue puppy who turned out to be a pit bull. It is shocking how much that deterred dudes from yelling. Two, I moved to Michigan. In my corner of the world, everyone walks or runs or bikes. I’ve never been yelled at here or had any kind of bad interaction for my audacity. It shocked me how much I’d gotten used to the terrible stuff that came with being a woman running or walking, and how much of a relief it was to have it gone.
Brava and thank you for this lyz! I have had too many reasons to hide away recently, even before this polar vortex descended on us. Walking, hiking, bicycling, and running were always a part of my life, but lately I have struggled for the inspiration to regain this vitally integral part of me. Some of it was the fear of bodily injury or at the least harassment. Your words are a GIFT! I will lace on my running shoes and reclaim my space!
Every time I go out for a run or a walk, I have to remember all the things to "make me safe" whereas my husband, my brother just walk out the door without a care in the world. The vigilance for women is exhausting.
I was shaking with rage while reading about the outcome of the case. I hope the woman he injured is doing okay.
I never experienced such harassment when I was able to run in Illinois, but that predated this current polarized era. When I lived in Colorado post-Trump, a pickup driver did a u-turn in an intersection to point his truck at me, revving his engine and calling me a dumb c*** for not crossing fast enough (I walk with a limp and had only looked at him while crossing to make sure he saw me, but I guess he took my direct gaze as a challenge of some sort). I will forever be mad that I didn't say "You don't even know me; I'm a smart c***!" but in the moment, I really did think he was going to run me down, and I physically couldn't run to get away. I learned that day that having mobility limitations puts us women at even greater risk.
"Blowing coal" was (is?) also a thing there, where pickup drivers blast black exhaust fumes into cyclists' and runners' faces as they pass them. I saw that a lot while I lived there. There was a lot of resentment of cyclists.
I live in the US, work at a university, and ride my bike to campus every day. What do you suppose the actuary tables say about my likeliest cause(s) of death? In most states, there is no criminal penalty for pedestrian/cyclist assault with motor vehicle, the most pure and real expression of petro masculinity there is -- tip of the jargon cap to Dr Cara Daggett for that all too accurate description of these untied states of ours -- so much for our daze in court.
Of all the incredible words Lyz has strung together here, I am most haunted by her account of the violence at the post-Roe protest in Cedar Rapids, when a truck driver ran down two women in the goddamn crosswalk without consequence. So much for his daze in court.
I see all of you beautiful weirdos moving through space without a combustion engine, and I love you more than I fear for you. Make no mistake, I do fear for you (and me) quite a lot. Please, continue to see each other. This is another way we resist and, eventually, overcome.
Such a beautifully written reflection on running and walking while female in the spaces around us. As a teenage runner, I ran on neighborhood streets and experienced the beginning of many years of cat-calling from male voices in large vehicles that sped by me. Why do they always have to do that? I'm just out here running, my 16-year old self wondered. Then as a 20-something, 30-something, still wondering the same. These days, as a 47-year old women who walks all bundled up (usually), I no longer get cat-calls, but I do get the large vehicles speeding by, noisily, as if to say what nerve I had to take my dog for a walk on this public street. In 2012, I moved to a New England college town and realized there were no sidewalks practically anywhere. I had two small kids - an infant and a 3-year old - and I had always enjoyed the privilege of a walk/stroller ride to a park on a nice day in the city that we moved from. No more. Not only did the town not have sidewalks, but no playgrounds that were accessible to kids that were not students enrolled in the public elementary school. My kids are now 16 and 12, and I live less than 2 miles away from their middle and high schools. But, I never let them walk to/from school because the busy street they would need to take has no sidewalk (the same street on which I walk my dog, so I know firsthand the danger). Fortunately, the bus service makes it easy for me to allow them to walk to the end of our street and catch it. All of this is to simply say that your reflection resonated with me in so many ways as a woman and mom who has always enjoyed the pleasure of running and walking on my local neighborhood roads and hoped I could instill the same values in my kids, yet I've experienced so many barriers that are reflective of the larger context - this need to stay in and "be safe".
Frightened, itty-bitty little men, hiding behind their behemoth pick-up trucks to shout their anger at those women enjoying a walk or run. How DARE she!
WTF is wrong with these strange, chest-pounding wanna-be menfolk??
They know with certainty deep in their pathetic piteous souls that their little winkie dinks will never ever be as big as their puffed up, imaginarily inflated, dum de dum dum egos.
It’s not just runners and other pedestrians, bicyclists are at risk on every street and, like your insane truck driver, those who hit and kill them usually get off with the reasoning that the cyclist shouldn’t have been there. And don’t get me started on traffic engineers, who seem devoted to making all roadways as unsafe as possible for walkers, runners and cyclists of all ages. We are all at the mercy of the dominance of automobiles and trucks, even when they’re not driven by bigots but just the unobservant.
Please forgive a 90-year-old Canadian writing to you; I've just finished reading your "running" article, and I am somewhere between angry, livid, furious and desperately sad. I like to think that up here in Canada we're a bit better than this, but I'm not a woman so I can't be sure of that. Meanwhile, the incredibly stupid president-elect of the Divided States of America, Donald Convict, wants Canada to be the 51st state. I wish no harm to anyone, but would some pickup driver aim their vehicle at Trump? PS: The old English word "Trump." means "fart."
Yes to all of this! Keep taking up space in the streets! It's so important, especially in places where it's counter-cultural. This is my soapbox as a militant pedestrian. And yes, I'm lucky to live in a neighborhood in a city (Portland, Ore.) where walking is normal, where cars look for pedestrians and cyclists, where you can get on foot (by bus or train) most places you need to go. I want it for everyone! Healthy, neighborly, free, climate-friendly, fun—how humans are meant to move. Walking (or safe rolling on a bike or in a wheelchair) is the ultimate freedom.
I don't run (hypermobility and athletes asthma) but I cycle. This year I attended a Critical Mass group just two days after a motorist killed two cyclists, one of whom happened to by one of the darlings of our local hockey team. The power of all of us cycling down the middle of the downtown streets, taking up space and going at an easy pace, was amazing. We thankfully didn't encounter any aggression—it's a hockey town and the death had rocked the city, so a bunch of cyclists, half of whom were wearing Flames jerseys, probably just came off as a funerary ode to anyone who doesn't know about Critical Mass. But I know that aggression is there. That dislike of someone who dares choose a mode of transport that isn't a car or truck. And always a little extra if you aren't masculine presenting.
As a trans woman, I am terrified of what is to come in the next few years. I intend to stay who I am and not hide away. However, I've also decided not to travel out of the blue enclave where I live, fearing a chance encounter with an election-emboldened crazy. Of course, such an encounter could happen right outside my door, but the odds are lower - a little less unsafe is the most realistic goal right now. I deeply feel every word of the last paragraph of your excellent article. Thank you!
One of our Relay Iowa members is trans and I love watching her run through the fields of Iowa, taking up space, writing with her feet that she belongs here too. I am glad you have safety. You belong here and you deserve to be an unhindered body in every space you enter.
Erica, I dream of the day when you can feel safe anywhere. And I will never stop fighting for that.
YES. And also - we may be the minority - but there are a lot of us in red states fighting hard for you. We are still here shouting for you in the spaces without you. I will never hide my support for you.
We all have to stick together. And might I suggest you travel to places like Greece and Germany where you are more accepted than in red states.
I’m 66, and my knees and feet preclude running now, but when I was in college and grad school in the 70s and early 80s, I ran regularly. In the snow and ice, I took to running inside at the Armory track, where no one ever harassed me. But the rest of the time, i ran through campus to get to a beautiful residential neighborhood. To get there, I ran past frats and across the Quad, and I got yelled at every time by boys (I refuse to call them men, though they had the heft and danger of men). Back then, women running wasn’t nearly as common, and I guess I thought it was partly the novelty that incited them, but the point is that *I* felt self-conscious, like a rule-bending freak, even though I was conscious enough to despise them, too. I thought they were reacting to some defect in my body, and I guess they were: I was a woman. I am enraged these days, about so many things, but now I’m enraged about what you, and other women, have to endure merely to feel your wonderful bodies moving through the air, the landscape under your own power. Fuck those men.
Yup. Fuck those BOYS.
I'm 85. Last night something happened that seems to have affected my right side, where a stroke affected things nearly 3 years ago, plus skewing my vision. Whether I can work my way out of this remains to be seen. Reading your piece, shocked at what you have to endure, simply to exist as you wish, as anyone human wishes to exist, I felt as if you were running for all of us who cannot.
I started practicing law when the idea flabbergasted some men. A (male) colleague at my first lawyer job said that he had some clothes that needed tailoring: could I do it? Yes, as it happened - we girls learned sewing, by hand and machine, in regular public school, and for some years I made most of my own. clothes. But why should I? He could take it to a tailor who did it professionally. Why did Woman Lawyer = Generic Female = She who sews? So keep running Lyz, for us all. You will never know how many of us, broken now and worth little perhaps in the eyes of the world, run as fierce as lionesses beside you.
you speak for so many of us elder women. fierce as lionesses - i cherish this image. the buddhists call this 'grandmother wisdom.' we are compassionate and tough. thank you!
Sarah, I hope your health issue resolves without further impact.
This just made me cry. I can exactly articulate why. I LOVE to walk. If I could, I would get everywhere by walking. Meandering in new places while traveling has always provided the best and most unexpected delights. I’ve never thought about its connection to freedom and being in the world the way you so beautifully describe here. I think my tears are for the beauty of it and because…fuck…we can’t even have this seemingly simple thing…to walk. And yet we will! Thank you for this.
It will empower me to walk with my head up and take up as much space as possible, and to not take it for granted.
Moving story. You are absolutely correct. I run and bike and have been threatened and verbally assaulted repeatedly. In Texas a white pickup with two men and a woman jerked to the side of the outer road ahead of me and the occupants starting shouting obscenities at me, calling me a liberal pig. I refuse to be frightened off my own streets, out of my own life and the things I love. If I die running or cycling, then I die living, doing the things that make me feel the most connected with the world I love. If I hide indoors, then hate wins and the most important part of me dies, but a new kind of suffering starts which goes on and on until my shell crumbles.
This made me miss running so much, although I walk as much as possible now. I’ve had stuff thrown at me, yelled, horns honked, almost hit several times (I used to yell back at cars but then I stopped because guns and road rage). This was all in suburban Atlanta.
Two things changed. One, I got a tiny rescue puppy who turned out to be a pit bull. It is shocking how much that deterred dudes from yelling. Two, I moved to Michigan. In my corner of the world, everyone walks or runs or bikes. I’ve never been yelled at here or had any kind of bad interaction for my audacity. It shocked me how much I’d gotten used to the terrible stuff that came with being a woman running or walking, and how much of a relief it was to have it gone.
Brava and thank you for this lyz! I have had too many reasons to hide away recently, even before this polar vortex descended on us. Walking, hiking, bicycling, and running were always a part of my life, but lately I have struggled for the inspiration to regain this vitally integral part of me. Some of it was the fear of bodily injury or at the least harassment. Your words are a GIFT! I will lace on my running shoes and reclaim my space!
Every time I go out for a run or a walk, I have to remember all the things to "make me safe" whereas my husband, my brother just walk out the door without a care in the world. The vigilance for women is exhausting.
Sending this to my kid, whose passions are running and ridding the world of cars.
I was shaking with rage while reading about the outcome of the case. I hope the woman he injured is doing okay.
I never experienced such harassment when I was able to run in Illinois, but that predated this current polarized era. When I lived in Colorado post-Trump, a pickup driver did a u-turn in an intersection to point his truck at me, revving his engine and calling me a dumb c*** for not crossing fast enough (I walk with a limp and had only looked at him while crossing to make sure he saw me, but I guess he took my direct gaze as a challenge of some sort). I will forever be mad that I didn't say "You don't even know me; I'm a smart c***!" but in the moment, I really did think he was going to run me down, and I physically couldn't run to get away. I learned that day that having mobility limitations puts us women at even greater risk.
"Blowing coal" was (is?) also a thing there, where pickup drivers blast black exhaust fumes into cyclists' and runners' faces as they pass them. I saw that a lot while I lived there. There was a lot of resentment of cyclists.
Forgot to add - I love these yearly meditations and this one was just beautifully written.
I live in the US, work at a university, and ride my bike to campus every day. What do you suppose the actuary tables say about my likeliest cause(s) of death? In most states, there is no criminal penalty for pedestrian/cyclist assault with motor vehicle, the most pure and real expression of petro masculinity there is -- tip of the jargon cap to Dr Cara Daggett for that all too accurate description of these untied states of ours -- so much for our daze in court.
Of all the incredible words Lyz has strung together here, I am most haunted by her account of the violence at the post-Roe protest in Cedar Rapids, when a truck driver ran down two women in the goddamn crosswalk without consequence. So much for his daze in court.
I see all of you beautiful weirdos moving through space without a combustion engine, and I love you more than I fear for you. Make no mistake, I do fear for you (and me) quite a lot. Please, continue to see each other. This is another way we resist and, eventually, overcome.
Such a beautifully written reflection on running and walking while female in the spaces around us. As a teenage runner, I ran on neighborhood streets and experienced the beginning of many years of cat-calling from male voices in large vehicles that sped by me. Why do they always have to do that? I'm just out here running, my 16-year old self wondered. Then as a 20-something, 30-something, still wondering the same. These days, as a 47-year old women who walks all bundled up (usually), I no longer get cat-calls, but I do get the large vehicles speeding by, noisily, as if to say what nerve I had to take my dog for a walk on this public street. In 2012, I moved to a New England college town and realized there were no sidewalks practically anywhere. I had two small kids - an infant and a 3-year old - and I had always enjoyed the privilege of a walk/stroller ride to a park on a nice day in the city that we moved from. No more. Not only did the town not have sidewalks, but no playgrounds that were accessible to kids that were not students enrolled in the public elementary school. My kids are now 16 and 12, and I live less than 2 miles away from their middle and high schools. But, I never let them walk to/from school because the busy street they would need to take has no sidewalk (the same street on which I walk my dog, so I know firsthand the danger). Fortunately, the bus service makes it easy for me to allow them to walk to the end of our street and catch it. All of this is to simply say that your reflection resonated with me in so many ways as a woman and mom who has always enjoyed the pleasure of running and walking on my local neighborhood roads and hoped I could instill the same values in my kids, yet I've experienced so many barriers that are reflective of the larger context - this need to stay in and "be safe".
Frightened, itty-bitty little men, hiding behind their behemoth pick-up trucks to shout their anger at those women enjoying a walk or run. How DARE she!
WTF is wrong with these strange, chest-pounding wanna-be menfolk??
They know with certainty deep in their pathetic piteous souls that their little winkie dinks will never ever be as big as their puffed up, imaginarily inflated, dum de dum dum egos.
It’s not just runners and other pedestrians, bicyclists are at risk on every street and, like your insane truck driver, those who hit and kill them usually get off with the reasoning that the cyclist shouldn’t have been there. And don’t get me started on traffic engineers, who seem devoted to making all roadways as unsafe as possible for walkers, runners and cyclists of all ages. We are all at the mercy of the dominance of automobiles and trucks, even when they’re not driven by bigots but just the unobservant.
Please forgive a 90-year-old Canadian writing to you; I've just finished reading your "running" article, and I am somewhere between angry, livid, furious and desperately sad. I like to think that up here in Canada we're a bit better than this, but I'm not a woman so I can't be sure of that. Meanwhile, the incredibly stupid president-elect of the Divided States of America, Donald Convict, wants Canada to be the 51st state. I wish no harm to anyone, but would some pickup driver aim their vehicle at Trump? PS: The old English word "Trump." means "fart."
Yes to all of this! Keep taking up space in the streets! It's so important, especially in places where it's counter-cultural. This is my soapbox as a militant pedestrian. And yes, I'm lucky to live in a neighborhood in a city (Portland, Ore.) where walking is normal, where cars look for pedestrians and cyclists, where you can get on foot (by bus or train) most places you need to go. I want it for everyone! Healthy, neighborly, free, climate-friendly, fun—how humans are meant to move. Walking (or safe rolling on a bike or in a wheelchair) is the ultimate freedom.
I don't run (hypermobility and athletes asthma) but I cycle. This year I attended a Critical Mass group just two days after a motorist killed two cyclists, one of whom happened to by one of the darlings of our local hockey team. The power of all of us cycling down the middle of the downtown streets, taking up space and going at an easy pace, was amazing. We thankfully didn't encounter any aggression—it's a hockey town and the death had rocked the city, so a bunch of cyclists, half of whom were wearing Flames jerseys, probably just came off as a funerary ode to anyone who doesn't know about Critical Mass. But I know that aggression is there. That dislike of someone who dares choose a mode of transport that isn't a car or truck. And always a little extra if you aren't masculine presenting.