Body Week is Them’s annual look at what it means to live in a queer body today. Read more from the series here.
The first time I did a deadlift, I was surprised at how powerful I felt.
I was catching up with my friend Koji Shiraki on a visit home to Southern California, checking out the gym in their garage where they had started training their friends. String lights and a disco ball dangled from the painted rafters. The power rack was surrounded by a disassembled drum kit and a guitar amp, and the bench in the middle of it all sat atop a vibrant purple rug. If I was going to learn how to lift weights, I thought to myself, I’d love to do it in a space like this.
Shiraki was eager to teach me, showing me the basics of the form and assuring me I wouldn’t injure myself. I hinged at the waist, grabbed onto the barbell, and used my legs to push myself away from the ground into a standing position once, then twice, then five times.
“Nice,” they said. “You’re hella strong!”
I believed them. For a brief moment, I had felt it myself — the invigorating sensation of forcing yourself to be deeply rooted in your body, focusing every neuron in your brain, every inch of sinew clinging to your bones, on a singular task. Moreover, I had fun. After a lifetime of receiving messages that fitness spaces weren’t for people like me — fat, brown, trans, queer — it turns out that all I needed was for one person to show me that wasn’t true.
Shiraki is just one coach working in a growing movement to make fitness spaces more inclusive, and to expand the idea of what “fitness” even means in the first place. The fitness industry in the U.S. is built on a history of white supremacy, and marginalized people often encounter hostility while trying to engage with it. But in the past several years, queer and trans-friendly fitness spaces, both IRL and virtual, appear to be on the rise, judging from the number of affirming gyms and studios that you can now find in any decently sized American city.
“I like to think that [the] community of people is growing. It feels like it’s growing,” Asher Freeman, a Philadelphia-based personal trainer who created the Nonnormative Body Club project tells me.
For Freeman, as for many trans trainers, creating an inclusive space goes beyond flying the requisite Pride flags; they are cultivating an approach to fitness that affirms our bodies’ abilities as they are, rather than being mired in shame. Finding community, Freeman tells me, has been essential in carving out an anti-oppressive niche in an industry that “profits off of making people hate their bodies.”
Freeman initially started lifting in the hopes of sculpting a more masculine physique without hormones. Though that didn’t “drastically” change their appearance, they tell me, it did transform their relationship to their body. “Using my body or free weights or whatever to challenge my muscles has just been such an incredible tool for my mental health, for my connection to my body, for my comfort with my gender confidence,” they say.
As a personal trainer, Freeman has noticed that many trans people, their past self included, lack a strong sense of proprioception, a term used to describe your body’s ability to sense its own movement. “Poor awareness of our bodies in space can just come from needing to check out as a coping mechanism or survival skill,” Freeman explains. “Especially with trans people, and with people who have experienced trauma, people who’ve experienced fatphobia — anyone who’s had a reason to check out from their body.”
Simply logging hours in the gym has helped Freeman feel more embodied, and they’re passionate about sharing that tool for embodiment with others. “I think we just need a lot more time and support to reconnect,” they say.
DJ Rock, a Brooklyn-based personal trainer who teaches at OutBox Gym and Fringe Pilates, also came to some important realizations about her gender through fitness. Previously “averse to physical fitness” until the late 2010s, she tells me, Rock was forced to start paying attention to her health after receiving some medical tests that indicated she had high cholesterol, among other results. During that period, she felt detached.“ I wasn’t concerned about anything because the body just felt like this thing that wasn’t mine that I had to be with,” she tells me. “I think the more connected with my body, the more I understood what I liked and disliked about it.”
That included understanding that she felt good when her body looked more “feminine,” which led to her thinking, “Maybe I can then explore that with hormone therapy and things like that as well.” Now, she teaches a weekly donation-run strength training class at OutBox, where she begins each class by asking participants to gather in a circle and introduce themselves. Each person shares their name, their pronouns, and the energy that they’re bringing to class today — whether they’re stressed because of work, mad because of a breakup, or feeling ready to conquer the hour-long full-body circuit. Rock also curates the playlists for the classes herself, which can range from 2000s pop and R&B to hip-hop holiday classics.
Rock set out to subvert the expectations that people bring to a typical strength training class. “I really find joy in helping people who have similar journeys to mine and particularly trans people who are using fitness as a way to connect with their bodies,” she says.
A focus on feeling good rather than achieving specific physical results is perhaps the key factor that differentiates this corner of fitness from the industry writ large. Jayne A. Quan, a client of Landyn Pan, who runs a virtual personal training practice, says that they used to have an unhealthy relationship with fitness, summing up their approach as follows: “If you didn’t feel like you were going to die at the end of a workout, you didn’t go hard enough, and therefore the workout was useless.”
Quan used to compare their lifting abilities to those of cis people, lamenting that their numbers weren’t as high as the men’s, or rejoicing that they were higher than the women’s, getting caught in a vicious cycle of working out to the point of injury and then taking whole months off to recover before starting over again. It wasn’t until they connected with Pan — who, like Quan, is Asian and transmasc — that Quan was able to stick to a regimented workout routine and shift their relationship to their body.
“[Landyn] really helped me understand that our bodies that are weightlifting are also transitioning, capable of things that we can’t even imagine yet because we haven’t taken the necessary steps,” Quan says. “Landyn really helped me make every single workout a very meaningful workout, even if it wasn’t the best, hardest workout that I have ever done.”
Trans trainers themselves are passionate about the impact their work has on the community. “So many of the people that I work with are doing cool and important work in the world as artists or organizers or teachers or therapists,” Freeman says, “and I just want to make sure that they are well, so they get to continue doing the good work that they’re doing in the world.” Like others working in the space, they offer sliding-scale options for their work and strive to create a genuinely anti-oppressive environment.
That’s not to say that trans fitness classes are inherently a body-positive utopia. There is still, as Freeman notes, an overrepresentation of white transmasc voices within the fitness space, and they repeatedly emphasize the influence of trans fitness professionals of color, including Ilya of Decolonizing Fitness along with Justice Roe Williams and Roc Rochon, two Black trans trainers who co-edited the book Deconstructing the Fitness-Industrial Complex.
Professional-run fitness classes can also still be financially inaccessible to many working-class queer and trans people. Quan says that they feel “super privileged” to have been able to overcome their gym anxiety by building an exercise space in their home during lockdown. “I didn’t want to go into a public space to be perceived while I worked out,” they tell me.
And Rock observes that there are certainly trans trainers —“I’m not gonna name names,” she says — who reinforce overly simplistic gendered ideas about bodies. “I like to challenge this notion that fitness for trans people means trans femmes want butts and trans mascs want pecs,” she says. Dysphoria and euphoria might be “huge parts” of fitness for some trans people, Rock acknowledges, but she believes that trans people are also “multi-dimensional complex human beings who enter fitness with a variety of prior experiences and a variety of desires and outcomes.”
“As a queer person, I use that word very intentionally,” Rock said. “I want to queer fitness and I think queering fitness means allowing space for people to be who they are individually and all of their identities and all of the aspects of who they are.”
Most people associate the fitness industry with radical physical transformation, which often involves trading old forms of dysmorphia for new versions of the same dissatisfaction. But trans fitness trainers are proving that perhaps the most radical transformation that can happen through exercise is an internal one. And what could be queerer than that?
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