My Bone-Chilling Ride With a “Transwoman” Lyft Driver

The Last Time I Tried Women+ Connect.

Some of you may remember the essay I published in Summer 2023, the morning after an Uber driver attempted to kidnap me in broad daylight.

For myself and many other women, an Uber or Lyft is considered a safer way to get to our next destination, particularly when we do not feel comfortable walking alone in the street.

Unfortunately, many of us have experienced the same exact dangers with our rideshare drivers, who are essentially a random sample collection of the same exact men we’d be walking the streets with, anyway.

Perhaps in response to the 400,000 sexual assault cases reported against Uber between 2017-2022, Lyft has attempted to leverage themselves as the safer alternative by providing a new service: Women + Connect.

Women+ is a ride share service that connects “women and nonbinary” riders and drivers with each other more often, so that all parties can take their ride without exposure to male violence. This is, of course, not the language that Lyft uses to describe the benefits of their service.

Instead, Lyft presents Women+ users as sharing a “common language”, having “more control”, and “more options”…which of course, is Chef’s kiss strategy when marketing to vulnerable women.

Because apparently, it worked on me.

Now I have to say—going into this, I knew that it was no safe haven.

As long as the law allows males to legally identify themselves as female, there is no such thing as a female-only space or service—at least not one which is public. Women’s spaces are quite literally illegal right now.

Also, once you add the word “nonbinary” into the picture, it really captures the meaninglessness of the space.

You’re entrusting people who have adopted a certain ideology about gender identity to be inherently safer individuals—when this is in fact, a sex-based issue.

But hey—it sells!

For a company, it’s really good P.R. when attempting to sell your services to the average woman who believes that “nonbinary” and “trans” are cute code words for “gay” or “woman-lite”.

But for me, as someone who knew better—I just wanted to try Women+ as a means of increasing my chances of having a female driver…And it worked!

The catch was that using Women+ also increased my chances of being matched with a male driver who identifies as a woman.

But while I accepted that risk, I truly was not prepared for my first ride with a “transwoman” to be as batshit insane as it was.

So this Halloween, I’d like to share my story about what happened on this very day last Halloween…the very first time a “transwoman” Lyft driver picked me up.

That ride was so hair-raisingly spooky, that it had me grateful to be skipping town for the next few months.