Why Violence Against Women is a Longstanding Feature of Bike Culture

Really. What the heck is with cycling? For as long as I’ve been paying attention to men in women’s sports, cycling has been simply rife with the be-penised. Yes, track and field had the all-male women’s 800-meter Olympic podium in 2016, and swimming had Lia Thomas sandbagging it to an NCAA National Championship in 2022, but for sheer numbers—every weekend, all over the country, for years—no sport beats cycling for lads in the ladies’.

The tireless woman behind i_heart_bikes was able to easily round up 30 men racing in the women’s category just for her June 2, 2024 post. By the following weekend, that number was out of date.

But more disturbing than the the number of men competing in women’s cycling is bike culture itself—it goes beyond nonconformist, subversive, bad boy to one of outright misogyny and startling violence toward women who stand up for female rights.

As always when male violence is normalized, incidents have escalated until something like this happen. Women Are Real member and no-holds-barred feminist Beth Bourne and three other women went to a race in Livermore, CA. Bourne described the abuse that took place in that video as the most terrifying two minutes of her life. It shows the race director screaming profanities in her face and physically assaulting her, and the race director’s wife taking her phone. At the same race, Bourne has video of trans-identified male rider Chelsea Wolfe telling her to “Suck a sawed-off shotgun,” while female riders (oh the shame) laugh and pile on with vile insults of their own. Men stole her signs and ripped them up. Not a single person, race official or spectator, defended her. They all watched this happen as if it were completely normal, and the correct response to someone questioning if the women’s race had men in it (hint: it did).

Multi-time Canadian Olympic cyclist Alison Sydor said: “People need to look at this and say, ‘Is this the culture of our sport?’ The answer is, I’m afraid so.”

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Threats, profanities, physical assault, invasion of boundaries—is that bike culture or is that violence? I admit, it’s hard to tell the difference. But women who’ve been on the working end of so-called cycling culture are pretty sure which is which.

What’s going to happen to this longstanding feature of cycling culture now that USA Cycling, under extreme duress from the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee, has changed it’s official policy to a female-only female category (see also, loopholes, below)?

I dunno. So, I called up Bourne, a nice woman and former bike racer who Katie Herzog called the only person more hated in Davis, CA than Trump; the aforementioned lavishly decorated Canadian rider and general know-a-lot about cycling Sydor; and three-time U.S. Olympian, ten-time National Champion, and straight shooter Inga Thompson. Asked about this “culture” of cycling, got an earful.

The Dudes

All three women agreed, a certain profile is overrepresented in the sport. Bourne has firsthand experience, an expert of sorts in Bike Man: “When I first started racing, I thought, these are my people. The male cyclists were these nerdy, quirky men. My ex-husband was a cyclist, an engineer. He is a trans believer. When our daughter came out as trans, he affirmed all of it. Cycling, rock climbing, fencing, disc golf—these sports are niche sports, male dominated, populated by men who are not the football or basketball guys. Guys with an engineering, mechanical mind, the tech bro. In fact, Silicon valley has always been very pro-trans. Way back in 2010, Oracle was paying for surgeries for trans women. By either claiming to be trans or supporting trans ideology, they feel cool and edgy. These are guys that are kind of mad that girls in high school didn’t want to go out with them.”

Inga Thompson did not mince words: “Like surfing or skateboarding, it attracts kind of a cool, hip crowd. These are not trans women who just want to live their lives. These are AGP men who want to say FU to women. They can just say ‘I’m trans’ and get into women’s spaces, into women’s sports. Molly Cameron dresses like a man—there is nothing female about Molly. He’s a grifter making money off of being ‘the most marginalized.’ I understand there are men with gender dysphoria and I have sympathy for them and their difficult journey, but it’s not women’s responsibility to fix it. I don’t have to give up my opportunities for someone’s gender dysphoria.”

The Women

The handmaiden vibe is strong here. “I’ve had to accept that women working against women is a thing,” Alison Sydor said. “I’ve had to accept that women have huge influence in what’s happened, in allowing men in women’s sport. For example, Elizabeth Tobey has been on the board of the Century Road Club, one of the largest and oldest on the East coast. When USAC announced that the female category would be female-only, she posted a long Instagram thread saying she was ‘full of despair’ that trans women would not be able to race in the women’s field, and suggested riders boycott USAC and USAC events in favor of those that would allow men. They’re welcome to their views, but what I don’t understand is their lack of ability to consider there’s female athletes who are happy about this. And women working against women is not new. Back when I was racing, I was invited to a race in Canada, and I told the race director I didn’t want start money [money paid to a big name athlete just to show up at a race], I just wanted the top three men and top three women to get the same prize money. At that time, the top three women’s pay out was less than men’s. Some elite women said I was wrong to do this. I couldn’t believe it.”

Beth Bourne had some thoughts on why women cheerlead male invasion of their sport, and are the most punitive toward women who stand up for their rights: “Women are raised to get along, they’re very social, they tend toward groupthink. They’re praised for fitting in. When I started speaking out, I was cut out by my very left leaning friends. Some of them agreed with me, but when they saw what it was going to cost them, they got quiet.”

While this is not cycling specific, I ran across a paragraph from Unwelcome Archive’s post You Can Never Wash Off That Male Privilege that offers another explanation for women’s seeming complicity in their abuse: “The very fact that womanhood is up for grabs and that the response to outrage is a shrug at best and violence at worst shows how little respect our society has for women. Just because this is the way things have always been does not make it okay. The fact that so many women themselves don’t recognize that there is anything at risk is another sad consequence of living in a world that devalues you from the beginning. We don’t know any better because this is all we’ve ever known.”

The Violence

By this I mean the open, widespread, condoned violence that’s endemic in cycling, more so than other sports. Since Beth Bourne is an omnivore of activism, showing up at a variety of different sports, she has a basis for comparison: “Cycling has the numbers. This is a 70-30 issue in the general population. Trans activists know at a track meet or a volleyball game, where there are quite a few people in the stands, there will be a good amount of people who will support me. But at a cycling event, it’s such a small community, there may only be two dozen spectators, mostly other racers. They have the numbers in their favor. There’s likely nobody saying, wait, she has a good point. It’s mob mentality, they come after you together. There’s one guy stealing my sign and someone else saying You’re a terrible person. It gives this small group permission to pile on. It makes them feel like they’re doing something right, instead of thinking critically. I was at a track meet where AB Hernandez was competing against mostly African American girls. Believe me, they didn’t buy this stuff, and neither did their parents.”

From a chat I had with Inga Thompson back in 2023, she said: “Young women, currently competing riders who have sponsorships and team places to lose, are still being silenced. A Cynisca rider recently told me about a statement she’d received from Chris Gutowsky [co-founder and CEO of Cynisca Cycling] saying that at the next race the riders would be accompanied by ‘undercover bodyguards.’ Whether that bizarre measure was to keep the riders from talking to the press, or the press from talking to the riders, it underscores the reality that the majority of female athletes do not want trans women on women’s teams but are being bullied into silence.”

Alison Sydor recalled that USAC was so thrown by women silently holding signs protesting men in their sport at the 2022 Cyclocross Nationals, they announced a fan code of conduct that prohibited signs and protests. Oddly, that code of conduct only applied to women. The race organizers welcomed a gun club to the 2023 Cyclocross Nationals, allowing them to visibly display their support for males in the women’s races, including a pride progress flag, a menacing display to back up the No Terfs signs and pride pins that were allowed. “Particularly since Beth Bourne’s shocking experience, cycling needs to accept there’s a lot of bullies in the sport, and it’s been condoned. There are definitely safe sport issues. We’ll see if USAC will have the guts to tackle that. It’s part of the culture that Our views are superior, and bullying and intimidation to enforce those views is seen as acceptable. I’d seen trans activist bullying on the internet, but I was floored by what I saw happening to Inga [Thompson] when she started speaking out—in person and on the internet, people using their real names, as if this was normal and acceptable. It was quite shocking to see.”

Thompson says Sydor is not wrong. “I’ve had so many violent threats. Bicycling Magazine editor Tara Seplvay threatened me with a bat. Cycling blogger Peter Flax wrote long essays on social media saying I was a Nazi. Trans BMX rider Chelsea Wolfe [yup, the same demure trans-identified male charmer who told Beth Bourne to ‘Suck a sawed-off shotgun’] also said I was a Nazi, and urged people to kill Nazis. Chelsea also posted a video of me and Martina Navratilova saying how ugly we were and that we were Nazis, and again urged people to kill Nazis for speaking up.”

The Policies

You could argue that, starting more than 20 years ago, policies that allowed men to compete in the women’s category led to ever-increasing numbers of “women” packing something extra in their bike shorts. But from 2003 to 2022, most Olympic sports also lost their minds and had that same man-inclusive policy, but did not see the wholesale invasion cycling did.

In fact, it was likely two Canadian cyclists, Kristen Worley and Michele Dumaresq, started the balls rolling, so to speak. Dumaresq had been banned from competing in women’s downhill mountain biking in 2002 for being male, but was later reinstated by UCI and went on to win three women’s downhill national championship titles. Worley, who’d cut off his man parts in 2001, joined with Dumaresq to lobby Canadian cycling to race in the ladies’, and they prevailed. In 2003, the International Olympic Committee flipped 180 degrees, from trying to keep men out of women’s sports to creating a way to let them in. The requirements were steep, orchiectomy being the most onerous, but Worley already qualified in that regard, and became the first male to try to compete at the Olympics in the female category. Try is the operative word, as Sorley never came close to a qualifying time.

But problems arose, as described by this blindingly obvious sentence from an article on the website Gender Team: “Returning to sport proved hugely difficult. The male-to-female transitioned body cannot produce androgens (male sex hormones), which has profound physiological effects.” Who knew? I never tire of telling this story. Worley claimed that cutting off his testicles brought on menopause, and complained that no matter how much he trained, his body continued to atrophy. It apparently did not occur to Worley that “transitioning to female” i.e. cutting off his balls, would necessarily involve “having female level of testosterone,” or less. Eventually he applied for a TUE for testosterone (!) from the Canadian Center for Ethics in Sport, and received it! More than just a jigger, Worley was allowed a T level of 10nmol/liter, which is ten times higher than the normal female level, and within the healthy male range. Even without considering his still-male physiology, 10nmol/liter of testosterone would without doubt provide enormous unfair advantage. To be clear, the IOC, and subsequently all Olympic sports, allowed castrated males to dope so that their male bodies could remain healthy while they competed in the female category.

Testosterone suppression has been utterly debunked as a means of mitigating male advantage, but that didn’t really matter because no one at USA Cycling was minding the shop anyway. “My husband was a USAC official,” Thompson said. “There is zero vetting process, there is no testing system, no way of proving any male has lowered his testosterone. Women just have to take USAC’s word for it.” In practice, cycling events have always been self-ID, and as we’ll see, continue to be.

Cycling’s policy was no more misogynistic than any sports organization— national and international governing bodies used the fact that all their peers were also screwing women over as reason to continue. That changed for UCI, cycling’s international organization, in 2023. By this time, World Rugby, World Aquatics, and World Athletics had all banned males from female sport at the elite level. The first ever UCI “super worlds,” with all disciplines competing at one giant event, were to be held in Scotland, and they were worried about protests.

“It was going to be embarrassing for them,” Sydor said. “Very quickly they had some closed door meetings, and came out with a policy banning males from women’s cycling at the elite level. Cycling would never have done this first, or because it was the right thing to do. When it became a liability for them, they did it in two weeks.”

Of course, it would have been easiest if USA Cycling simply adopted the international organization’s policy right away, in 2023, as Cycling Canada quietly did. “But it became very clear, USAC was never going to change their policy until they were forced to,” Sydor said. And why should they? Up until January of this year and Trump’s Executive Orders, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee actually threatened national governing bodies like USAC if they instituted a female-only category. Different administration, the kind and progressive one. USAC was only too happy to comply with edicts that rebranded misogyny as “inclusion.” The Executive Orders kicked off a cascade of squeeze plays—the USOPC was pressured to adopt female-only sports to be in compliance with the Executive Orders, and they in turn pressured national governing bodies like USAC to do the same or risk losing their status as an NGB. Thus, for self-serving reasons, none of which had anything to do with listening to women or respecting women’s rights, USAC stamped out a boilerplate policy of a female-only category, bing bang, effective September 15, 2025, before the National Championships in November.

The most current policy starts out using the identical language as the Executive Order: “Pursuant to the requirements set out above, the Women’s Category is limited to individuals who meet the following definition of female: ‘Female means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.’” All well and good. But in the next section, things start going all loophole-y. Sex is determined by what you put on your USAC membership application or race registration, and is presumed to be correct. Which sounds an awful lot like self-ID. Only USAC can challenge someone’s female status, and if they do, sex will be determined by birth certificate, which can easily be changed. All this policy protects is USAC’s NGB status. In practice, nothing has changed for women.

The Fallout

If cycling’s eagerness to embrace men in women’s racing was zealous before the September 15th policy change, the reaction since has been nothing less than desperate. The photo above was taken at the Englewood Open CX in Wisconsin on the weekend of October 11-12. Apparently it was only displayed during the women’s category 4 race, and was taken down after another team asked Femme Forty Racing, a team for women and nonbinary people, to do so.

Bizarre new categories such as Women+ popped up. The NOHOCX tried to make every category Open, including, puzzlingly, the Nonbinary category.

This did not fly, btw, but another clever workaround by the Chicago Cross Cup did—three waves for the women’s race: Categories1/2 women get podium + prize money; Categories 3/4 women get a podium; and an Open Category (male inclusive) of Categories 1-4 also get a separate podium. Seems like a lot of work just to let men race against women, but way worth it to the bike community. Though this is a private event, not USAC, the categories for the recent Singlespeed Cyclocross World Championships pretty much say everything there is to say about bike culture:

I contacted the race organizers of the above event. They were initially eager to talk about bike culture but, as it turned out, not the stupid part in which men can race wherever they want to, and women can too, as long as they don’t mind racing against men. This bit of absurdity brings to mind my spiritual leader Magdalen Bern’s words: They’re so open-minded, their brains have fallen out.

Fun aside, Sydor suggests the wailing and gnashing of teeth particularly by women trans rights activists is misplaced: “I don’t think they understand the range of views in the transsexual community.” Not all men with feminine identities necessarily think they are female, she pointed out. A fair number accept their identity without denying the reality of their sex, and would not be aggrieved to race in the male category.

As an example, male rider KJ Phillips was moved from female to nonbinary category following USAC’s policy change. “Elizabeth Tobey painted this picture of doom and suffering, but maybe she should talk to KJ,” Sydor said. “According to what I heard from a female rider who spoke to KJ at the event and the podium photos where KJ picked up a Silver medal, it looked like they had a great time. Back in the day, Molly Cameron raced in the men’s pro field. He was a decent rider, mid-pack, and very accepted, got lots of cheers. There was no exclusion [from the men]. He didn’t have to race in the women’s, he just wanted to. Women have always been accommodating of women with different identities. We can ask the same of men. And there are signs that men will be accommodating.”

Back to the initial question, how did bike culture get this way? It’s probably a mashup of all the things Bourne, Sydor, and Thompson talked about. But where, in the past, even Olympians’ voices, like Sydor and Thompson, have been ignored, USAC has now been forced to, at least on paper, define and defend the women’s category. And Beth Bourne is not one to be cussed at and beaten with a pizza box, and shut up about it. She filed a police report, and wrote a letter to USAC demanding that five of the people who abused her at the Livermore race face disciplinary action.

There is, however, every possibility the violence against women in cycling may get worse before it gets better. There will be some who think women having their own category is an erasure of a fondly held part of bike culture, and that quirky men who have been able to abuse women with impunity will react like entitled men, i.e. violently, to being told that, in fact, that kind of behavior isn’t their right.

But if Bourne, Sydor, and Thompson have anything to do with it, there is absolutely zero chance violence will be passed off as “bike culture.”