Discovery and coming out

Cruz described how, while growing up in the Seattle area, she was drawn to riding from a young age. “I spent a lot of time on different family farmlands,” she said. “It was more quads than motorcycles, but I loved fast things.”

Cruz reported first hearing of the DoB through family members. “My dad lives in San Francisco, [as did] my grandparents at the time,” she recalled. “I spent a lot of time there in the summers as a kid, and over the years, I had some Queer family members that used to talk about the parade and the Dykes on Bikes.”

Cruz said that she and her brother both struggled with coming out to parts of their family and in their careers, until about the late 2000s. It wasn’t until she met one of the original DoB members, Soni Wolf, by chance at a bar in San Francisco that she found the inspiration to come out.

“After chatting for a bit,” Cruz said, “something inspired me to say, ‘I’m currently coming out of the closet,’” adding that some family members and her workplace still didn’t know about her Queer identity and how she was dying to finally come out to them. “That was a big struggle for me,” she said.

That is when Wolf gave Cruz some advice that left a deep impact: “Fuck what everyone thinks, and live your truth. Life is too short — you could go [die] tomorrow.” 

“And that is the ongoing narrative in my mind that I’m reminded of,” Cruz said. “There’s no time to waste. You have to stand in your truth and power now.”

Creating Seattle’s DoB chapter

Cruz had ridden with members of the DoB in the Bay Area a couple of times and been solicited to join. But, she said, “I was a little hesitant to join because of my schedule. I’m a mom… I was fully out but just didn’t have the time to ride.”

But years later, she became inspired to start Seattle’s DoB chapter after coming across members of the San Francisco DoB while working at an all-women’s motorcycle campout retreat near Seattle called Dream Roll. There she noticed one of them wearing a Soni Wolf patch. 

“I just hollered out: ‘Soni Wolf! That person has a lot of meaning in my life!’ And I asked them, ‘Is there a Dykes on Bikes chapter here in Seattle? I live here now.’ They were like, ‘No — you should start one.’”

Cruz described tragically and unexpectedly losing her daughter seven months into her pregnancy and still processing the grief.

“One of the ways that I personally handle moving through grief is I pour myself into service,” she explained. “I’ve kind of done that my whole life. I just… I serve, you know? It’s a way I can transmute pain into something that might be meaningful to someone else. So I thought about it, and I was like, ‘You know what? I think I’m gonna.’”

Cruz said she decided to start the Seattle DoB chapter also because it felt like there weren’t any accepting safe spaces already.

“The motorcycle community needs a safe Queer space,” she explained. “Every group I rode with was either super hetero, very cisgender, or not Queer-friendly. I didn’t see myself represented in these groups, so I couldn’t find, like, a riding group that felt like home. I kind of bounced from group to group.”

After the pandemic, in 2022, Cruz began the process of organizing and applying for DoB chapter status. She said it also felt like a moment to inspire her Trans daughter, who has been struggling to embrace her identity in the current anti-Trans youth climate.

“I thought about what that might teach her,” she said, “that in your darkest moment in life, in the deepest pain you’re shattered, you can pull it together and build something for people.”

While chatting with San Francisco about chapter statues for a few months, inclusivity was a major topic, especially around Transgender members. “That was really important to me,” Cruz said.

She submitted the application to DoB San Francisco in November 2022, and the Seattle chapter’s application was accepted on May 8, 2023.

Running Seattle DoB

Cruz explained the process of putting the chapter together, from finding potential members to creating a board and setting up procedures, policies, and by-laws for the new organization. 

“You know, I’m just… one person, it was a lot of work,” she admitted.

As for what she believed was the core mission and ethos of DoB, she said, “Queer visibility and representation, the loudness of who we are in our presence and what it represents.” 

Community is one of the greatest forms of resistance, she said. “I felt like people need community right now. We don’t have enough of that.” Among Queer people, she added, “it’s chosen family that fills in so many gaps we experience in life… The safety that you get from being in this family is unprecedented. I’ve never experienced [such] a community that shows up…  it’s wild.”

Seattle Dykes on Bikes engages in various activities, from mutual aid to supporting a variety of events and actions for marginalized people to even community defense, like escorting people home. 

“There is a call right now for this collaborative defense of community — collective care — and that is intersectional, interorganizational work I think we have such a passion for,” Cruz said.

She also emphasized the importance of inclusivity: “Being inclusive has always been one of my number one goals outside of the chosen family aspect and intention. Being inclusive has been everything, so our chapter is very all over the spectrum — if there’s some part of the history and culture of being a dyke that resonates with you, that’s it. That’s all we need to know. Come to the family. 

“We take care of each other, and I see it every single day in this group. Nobody’s left to be alone. Nobody’s left to feel unsafe.”

Raising a Trans daughter

Cruz shared with the SGN her experiences of raising a 14-year-old Trans daughter, who since age 11 has witnessed all of the good work that the chapter has been doing. 

“If I leave this earth and have taught nothing but how to build community and mobilize, and the strength in that ability and act of resistance,” she said, “I think [it will] a lot to her, and it’s something that will help fortify her strength, independence, and confidence throughout life. At least I hope.”

She also talked about the challenges of her daughter also being deaf and struggling developmentally with acquiring language. Because of this, Cruz said, they moved back to the Bay Area for a time. 

“We moved all the way to California to get her into the best deaf school in the country, and she was starting to catch up,” she said. “But as soon as she acquired enough language and understanding, she told me at 6 1/2 years old that she was Trans. She told me she was a girl. And I just listened. And I just think, how powerful is that, to be able to be the mom I never had? How wonderful is that? What a gift, you know?”

Cruz said that at first it had been nice to keep her daughter inside of their Queer-positive bubble, but that “when she was about 11 or 12, I started to realize not telling her the things that are happening around her is doing her a disservice.”

She explained how her daughter has struggled in the past to understand the transphobia that is currently so pervasive. “She doesn’t understand why Trans people get targeted. It makes zero sense to her. She just wants to exist,” Cruz said. “It makes sense why she doesn’t understand, because it doesn’t fucking make sense. You know, it’s completely irrational hatred.”

Cruz said it had even gotten to a point where her daughter refused to go get her puberty blocker shots, because she was afraid to go to the doctor.

“There was some conversation at school [that led her to think] someone might hurt her if she walked into the doctor’s office,” Cruz said. She even offered to send members of the DoB to escort her daughter, but the girl was still too terrified.

“And so we’ve been having this ongoing conversation about that,” she added.

Another challenging moment was attending the Juniper Blessing memorial at UW together. It was particularly difficult to process as the parent of a Trans teenager. But as she has exposed her daughter to these things, she said, “I think she’s starting to really understand it.”

Cruz added that her daughter now feels confident enough again to go to the doctor for her shots, and that she and her partner will go with her. 

“They still offer services for her, what she needs right now, so I’m feeling really grateful that we still have access to that. If we didn’t, I honestly don’t know what I would do,” she said, in reference to Trans youth care programs being shut down across the country.

Supporting Trans youth

Cruz criticized the anti-Transgender sentiments in the US under Trump, and discussed what advice she’d give to parents of newly out Trans kids who aren’t familiar with the process.

“To target a person’s belief about themselves so much as to call it a sickness is just deeply disturbing — and how damaging for your child,” she said. “Trust that your child knows who they are. Just trust them — they don’t have any other agenda.”

She said that, as a parent of a Trans child, she has had this conversation with other parents quite a bit, and that sometimes “it blows my mind the lack of information and education some of the parents have. It breaks my heart.”

She added that as Queer and Trans kids are figuring themselves out, it may take time to locate their place on the spectrum of gender and sexuality, but that overall the worst thing a parent can do is “not support their growth and evolution, wherever it goes... 

“It is the greatest act of love to just accept a person and love them fully. Call it radical acceptance, call it whatever that is for you. Push through all that noise. And just listen to your child. That’s it.”

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