When bike mechanic Tammy Powers couldn’t find work at a bike shop, she started one of her own. Here’s how the standup comedian and owner of A Tran’s Bay Bike Shop turned her life around—and hopes to help others do the same.

In 2010 I came back to San Francisco to transition from male to female. I’m originally from New York City, but I lived in San Jose in high school and then in Colorado for many years. I wanted to move to a city that had a larger population of transgender people as well as bicyclists. I decided on San Francisco because I’d have a better chance of making it through a winter of homelessness in California. I’d completely run out of money because I needed electrolysis to remove hair from my face. I hated having a beard. I went through a lot to get all of that taken care of.

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I came out here broke and knew nobody. Being a skilled mechanic—I’d worked in bike shops and on cars—I thought it would be easy to find a job. But even though San Francisco is very accepting, it doesn’t mean male bosses are immediately open to hiring transgender women. They have a hard enough time hiring women as mechanics. It was a rude awakening for me.

Jay Watson

I was out on Treasure Island—a 400-acre island in the San Francisco Bay connected to Oakland and San Francisco by bridge—looking for a place to sleep when I realized the new Bay Bridge they were building from Oakland would have a bike lane on it. It dawned on me, Wow, there’ll be hundreds of bicycles coming through here every day. I convinced the City of San Francisco that it needed a bike shop here and that I was the one to do it.

I knew I had to dazzle them in one well-rehearsed elevator pitch, so I walked into the Treasure Island Development Authority office and said, “You have a large problem coming your way. You don’t know what it is, but I’m your answer to it. When the bike lane is finished on that new Bay Bridge, you’re going to need a bike shop on this island. I’m Tammy Powers and I’m the best bicycle mechanic in San Francisco. Do you have any places that I can rent so I can build a bicycle shop?”

They liked my confidence immediately and showed me a tiny place in the basement of this out-of-the-way building. The rent wasn’t much more than what I was paying to keep all my stuff in a storage unit. I was working my way up in the world! I got local residents to bring me their bicycles, so I was able to buy more tools and start carrying more inventory.

In the Bay Area, there’s the Transbay Tube, Transbay buses, and the new Transbay Center. I decided to be A Tran’s Bay Bike Shop. It still makes me laugh.

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I’m a Fuji dealer, I sell BMX bikes, I have fat-bike cruisers. I try to think about the alternatives people might want. Folding bikes make a lot of sense for people here because they can get them on the bus.

I’m hoping to put a location on the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge with rentals for tourists who want to ride across the bridge, and then hopefully add one near the UC Berkeley campus. Those are things I have planned for 2017.

Trans people have a very difficult time getting hired. When I was looking for a job as a bike mechanic, employers would contact me when I emailed my resume. Then when I’d show up for an interview, I’d see a shocked look that I’ve seen 100 times before. And then they’d make up some pathetic excuse, like, “We have a lot more resumes to look at.” I just opened a second business called Tammy’s Chicken in Waffles. I’d like to hire trans people there and at my bike shop, and I’ll tell them, “Look, if you know how to be friendly and polite, I can teach you everything else.”

I always need coffee when I’m working on bikes, but the options were pretty limited on the island—there was a mini market that served gas-station coffee, and that was it. I told the city I was going to start a coffee cart, and they offered me a prime location. For a year I did the cart early in the morning before working in the bike shop, but I couldn’t open when the weather was severe. Then I was able to buy a shipping container and start serving food. It’s been a big hit. I do my waffles in the morning, my bike shop during the afternoon, and my waffles in the evening.

The best part of having my own shop is that I’m the boss. I decide what gets done and when to do it and how to get it done. I’m able to explain things to people and they listen to my advice, and that’s satisfying—to have people respect the input I give them.

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Have you seen my stand-up comedy? I talk about the peculiarities of how society views me. I’m also very vulgar—I’m from New York! I got into it when I was just starting to transition. It was a release for me; my way of forgetting how miserable I was: Oh my God, I’m living on the sidewalk. But on the nights I performed, I was a stand-up comedian and I made people laugh. It was therapeutic.

At my waffle shack one night I was telling a customer how I got here from being homeless. I had no idea he was a moviemaker. (A lot of car commercials are filmed on Treasure Island because we have great views of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge.) He said, “Hey! I want to make you famous!” I was like, “Yeah, whatever.” But the film is being edited as we speak. The name is supposed to be Tammy’s Island. I’m hoping it’ll be on Netflix by the end of 2017. If people ask me, “Hey, how’s it going?” I can be like, “Well, the movie’s coming out soon.” It’s almost surreal.

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