How Trans Strength Trainers Are Helping People Find Their Inner Power
A new wave of coaches, trainers, and instructors are subverting the traditional approach to fitness.
Kadar R. Small / Courtesy of Them.
This article was originally published on them.us by James Factora. It has been shortened here for length.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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?
James Factora is an L.A.-born, New York-based writer and musician. Their work has also appeared in Teen Vogue, Slate, Refinery29 and others.
