‘Whose street? Our street! And not just this one, but all of them — but the idea of there even being a street.’ Photo by Selina Vesely.

Alex Manley TodayThe Tyee

Alex Manley (they/them) is a non-binary writer, editor, translator and poet from Montreal/Tiohtia:ke.

[Editor’s note: Alex Manley’s new book, ‘Post-Man: Essays on Being a Neurodivergent Non-Binary Person,’ out now from Arsenal Pulp Press, explores the ways in which Manley has felt themselves deviate from societal norms, particularly norms around masculinity. In this excerpt, Manley delves into the creation of the concept of jaywalking — and the rebellious joy that comes from opting to flout the rules of the road.]

Just as streets were invented and highways were invented and cars were invented and stoplights were invented, jaywalking had to be invented too; despite the primal feeling it can give off, it did not always exist.

But while you can argue that the other items on that list were invented for good, in the name of progress, by humanity itself, jaywalking was invented by a very specific group of people for a very specific reason. It was invented by the automobile lobby, to make it easier for them to sell cars.

In fact, originally, jaywalking didn’t mean crossing the street the wrong way, or illegally — it was a sidewalk-oriented version of jay-driving, when people (presumably country hicks) would drive on the wrong side of a road, not realizing the right side was the right side.

This term came to be adopted for people committing similar — though perhaps less binaristic — faux pas on sidewalks, and this word was the one the automobile lobby reached for when it needed a scapegoat.

In the 1910s, carmakers had run into an unpleasant reality about the experience of owning a car in early 20th-century America: pesky human beings had an awful habit of popping up right where they shouldn’t be, in front of their customers’ automobiles. Ow — your face got in the way of my fist.

In order to make sure the annoying experience of running someone over wasn’t cutting into their bottom line, they had to devise a way for human beings to cede the roadways — a non-trivial portion of urban space that had long been shared between people and slower-moving carriages — to cars.

But how to achieve such a goal, to reframe centuries-old human behaviour in short order before people rejected cars as being too likely to produce accidents? Luckily for them, mass media existed by then, and the auto lobby played it like a fiddle.

Car manufacturers pooled their resources to create the journalistic arm of their lobbying efforts, a “news bureau” whose sole function was to send newspapers ready-made clippings that framed accidents where cars ran over people as the fault of the victim. Newspapers nationwide that needed some extra column inches could make use of this professionally typed yellow journalism at no cost.

One needn’t be a scholar of history nor an understander of the effect that Fox News has had on America in recent decades to know what happened next: the tide of public sentiment turned against these bumbling jaywalkers. What were they doing in the street like that anyway, if they didn’t want to be run over?

Lawmakers hurried to attend to this pressing need — every day, it seemed, more stories about people being run over. Didn’t they know the danger? Laws were put in place banning the practice.

Just like that, the roads belonged to cars only. À qui la rue? À eux, la rue.

Whose street? Our street!

I stole that last line from the streets. When I was younger, in my mid-twenties, out walking late at night with friends, a few times I ambled out into the centre of the street, spread my arms wide, wingspan open to an imaginary audience, an imaginary coliseum, Russell Crowe in Gladiator, and shouted, “À qui la rue? À nous la rue!”

Whose street? Our street! And not just this one, this one that our feet are pressed against right now, but all of them — but the idea of there even being a street. Whose streets? Our streets. The ones that grid out the city we live in, the blocks we walk.

“À qui la rue? À nous la rue!” is one of the many chants that were employed by the people during the student movement in 2012, when Quebecers banded together, arm in arm, marching in the streets they owned — the streets their taxes had paid for and the streets their taxes would pay for forevermore, those Montreal streets, slapdash with asphalt, so famous for being riddled with potholes — banging pots and pans, making themselves heard until nothing could be heard but them, until through the din the provincial government realized tuition hikes were a non-starter.

When I was saying it aloud to those snowy midnight streets a decade ago, it was a joke, of course — at its peak, the red square movement had 300,000 out in the streets of downtown Montreal, and I was just a skinny kid in a dark toque and a black jacket. (If someone goes against a red light at night when there’s no one around to see it, is it really breaking the law? Or is it, as the track “Yo Yeah” on the Mos Def and Talib Kweli collaboration Black Star has it, a form of brainwashing not to?)

But there’s something there, still. Regardless of the disparity in our numbers, the printemps érable protesters had been doing as I was doing — pedestrians reclaiming the street, a space that is visibly and categorically not ours during the day — and my joking reappropriation of the chant, I realize, doubled as an homage to its power.

Try it sometime, in winter, if you can, with a fresh coat of snow on the ground, ideally. Alone in the middle of the street, with no cars to fear and silence reigning, it really does feel like your street.

Something so, well, pedestrian

Part of what I love about jaywalking is that I love walking itself too much to let it be so boxed in by petty bourgeois constraints like municipal bylaws.

As someone who has lived their whole life in a place that people now might call a 15-minute city, and who still has never learned how to drive, walking has crossed over from being a mode of transportation into the territory of being a load-bearing part of my self-conception.

I’ve loved walking places for as long as I can remember, figuring out the best routes to take, forming my own desire paths, cutting Pythagorean diagonals through the Cartesian grid of reality, my footprints little dotted lines stretching out behind me. Though biking is more economical, and public transit can do a wonderful job at protecting you from the elements, walking feels like the most honest form of movement I have.

It’s also one that can be hard to talk about, given how little the average person seems to think about it. I once bonded with someone over our shared preference for walking long distances in new cities rather than trying to learn the local public transit system.

Worse yet, I once wrote a treatise on how to do it well (“The Beginner’s Footbook to Extreme Powerwalking”), trying to distill all the lessons I’d learned about using my feet to move from Point A to Point B, over 2,500 words of walking advice meted out across nine points, extolling the values of things like diagonals and fulcrums. Point 5 on the list was titled “Ignore the Stoplight.”

I’m not sure who such a text would be for, other than a younger version of me. But I think about it sometimes and laugh, laugh at how terribly neurodivergent it feels, how silly it is to care this much about something so, well, pedestrian.

Excerpted from ‘Post-Man: Essays on Being a Neurodivergent Non-Binary Person’ by Alex Manley. Copyright © 2025 Alex Manley. Published by Arsenal Pulp Press. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

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