This is a sensitive and painful topic for me, and I'm speaking from my lived experiences.  Here's where I'm coming from. 

I left my local bike collective a couple years ago when, over an extended period of time, it was repeatedly made explicitly clear to me that safer space was not a priority for that bike collective at that time.  I really value bike collectives and I want them to be safer spaces where everyone is able to feel comfortable going to learn how to fix their bike any day of the week. 

When the collective is already skewing cis white male, adding a women & trans shift shifts those core women & trans volunteers to bearing the responsibility of keeping that shift open.**  It was a burden being one of the only people of any gender who was actively working to uphold a safer space at a bike collective.  It was a burden when nearly the only time anyone of any gender was working to uphold a safer space was at women & trans night. 

From what I know of the Bike Pirates, I expect y'alls's volunteers are kickass at upholding safer spaces every day of the week.  As a healthy bike collective, I would have considered you to be in an excellent position to host exclusive programming.  If a bike collective is already struggling to be inclusive, I would not recommend exclusive programming as I have seen it exacerbate the dynamic.

It's important to have a balanced and welcoming space on all shifts, and if there isn't, the people hosting the space damn well better be fucking excellent at upholding a safer space or next thing you know, it's all cis white men at your meetings and if you're lucky, they're all looking around wondering how to fix it.  Ask me how I know.

<3

Angel York

she/hers/etc

**Let's run some numbers.  Say you've got 10 core volunteers and you want to host 5 shifts a week. Let's say you've got a pretty good balance, 40% of the core volunteers are women/trans etc., or 4 people.  For the purposes of this very simple illustration, we'll ignore intersectionality (race, ability, age, class, etc), and we'll have 6 men (M), 4 women/trans/femme/etc. (WTF) 

Example 1  For this example, we will host a women & trans night. 

shift 1: M + M

shift 2: M + M

shift 3: M + WTF

shift 4: M + WTF

shift W&T: WTF + WTF

In this example, public shifts are entirely cis dude 50% of the time.  See my closing paragraph above.

Example 2 For this example, we will not host a women & trans night

shift 1: M + WTF

shift 2: M + WTF

shift 3: M + WTF

shift 4: M + WTF

shift 5: M + M

This example shows where a bike collective might be when they start to wonder whether it's time to host a women & trans night.  the public shifts are looking pretty balanced 80% of the time.  That's a passing grade! 

Conclusion: to add a women&trans night, you first need a mostly-woke group of core volunteers on every shift.