Tranny on a beamer

In an odd coincidence today, I found a picture of the woman who sold me my beloved table saw. I didn't know that shortly I would be buying a table saw from her when this picture was snapped--she was just the person in front of me in the Dykes on Bikes contingent of the SF pride parade. She came over and struck up a friendly conversation as we all waited impatiently for the parade to start.
She was very tall and lean, and in the picture she's smiling broadly, leaning on her bike with one hand resting delicately on the handlebar, the other dangling idly off at a tangent from her hips, a result of her jauntily off-center stance. I knew she was a transsexual (this is 1994, before "transgender" came into its own, and "M to F"--well, of course what else?) when I first saw her, heard her voice, but the pose captured in the photo emphasizes plainly what few token masculine features remained -- broad shoulders, giant hands, and a certain squareness of the jaw. I guess she identified as a lesbian as well, but probably not as strongly as a motorcyclist. We talked bikes for half an hour, from chain lubricants to spare parts dealers to reaching nirvana on route 1.
When the parade finally started, we revved up and were off on our 5 mph cruise down Market St. It felt great to be following someone who, back straight, head up and smile flashing, seemed to embody the notion of pride despite the fact that the parade at this time didn't officially support or want to include transgender people. "Fuck 'em" was, I like to imagine, our shared sentiment.
So, a couple months later, when I found myself in Berkeley at Whole Earth tools I was delighted to talk shop once again with this defier of gender-norms. I couldn't have articulated this then, but the deep resonance I felt with this woman was a glancing recognition of the true expansiveness of gender, the rich variety and inherent contradictions within us all. I believe we contain many many ways of being, and when we overcome fear and doubt and the conditioned urge to templatize and assimilate, we may be who we are, all that we are. And man, did she know her table saws.