That rumbling sound that you may have heard this week may be the Dykes on Bikes. The San Francisco motorcycle club got final approval for its trademark of the name “Dykes on Bikes” when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge from a men’s right advocate.
The San Francisco Women’s Motorcycle Contingent had sought the commercial use of Dykes on Bikes. They applied for a trademark in 2003. However, it was initially rejected by the government on the basis that the name was disparaging to lesbians. However, it was then approved in January 2006 after the club submitted evidence that activists saw the term as a point of pride. However, Michael McDermott — a men’s rights advocate — challenged the trademark as “scandalous and immoral.”
A trademark would put the definition in the hands of a group of “thought police” and contradict the “widespread documented understanding of the term ‘dyke’ as describing hyper-militant radicals hateful toward men,” McDermott wrote in his Supreme Court appeal.
He also said men were illegally excluded from city streets traversed by the annual Dyke March, which precedes the Gay Pride Parade and is also led by bikers.
The Federal Circuit did not address the exclusion claims but rejected the trademark opposition, which was clearly the correct decision. So now now justice in leather chaps will roar undeterred down the streets of America.
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