When Pat Manuel used to work out, gym staff assumed the teen wanted to trim down and tone up. Manuel was born with a woman’s body, and experience told them that’s what women want. “A lot of gym trainers would [say] things like, ‘Oh, you don’t want to get too bulky,'” remembers Manuel, now a 30-year-old in Long Beach, California.
Little did they know that, at the time, Manuel identified as a lesbian who craved broad shoulders, a strong back and defined arms. “I wanted to embody that type of masculinity I saw on movies and video games, and decided to start boxing,” says Manuel, who came out as genderqueer 2013 and began identifying as a man later that year. “It was kind of a last-ditch effort to feel better about myself.”
It worked: Manuel found the sport to be a healthy distraction from gender dysphoria, or feeling trapped in the other gender’s body. “It was all about being better at my sport,” says Manuel, who competed as a woman at first and, since transitioning, continues to compete as a (much happier) man today. “That type of training removes the [gender] binaries that we usually have in physical fitness.”
[See: 11 Simple, Proven Ways to Optimize Your Mental Health.]
Not everyone finds such a healthy workout environment. From assumptions about clients’ ideal body types to membership forms that require checking a male or female box, members of the LGBT community say they can feel unwelcome in some fitness facilities. “You hear that gyms are supposed to be a safe place where you can just let it out, but they’re really not for a lot of people,” says Manuel, who launched the fitness company Buff Butch in 2013 to help change that.
Exercise professionals are also often ill-prepared to work with clients who don’t fit traditional gender and sexual identity molds, adds David Smith, a personal trainer and fitness instructor in Denver who founded Stonewall Fitness to bring together the LGBT community through exercise. “The first time I was ever approached by a trans client … I realized: My training did not cover working with a trans client,” he says.
That would have been valuable, Smith says, since hormones and surgeries can affect muscle development, metabolism and exercise recovery. Since educating himself on the topic, he’s helped a transgender man, for one, strengthen his chest muscles prior to breast-removal surgery to boost recovery and support his transition to a more masculine body. For Manuel, taking testosterone spurred muscle growth but didn’t strengthen his joints. “I didn’t realize … I’d basically have to strengthen up my hands because hitting started hurting more,” he says.
[See: 8 Lesser-Known Ways to Ruin Your Joints.]
Fitness facilities can also feel intimidating to LGBT clients — even when there are no outward signs of discrimination or stigma, experts and members of the community say. Lesbian women, for example, may worry that they’ll make other women uncomfortable in the locker room, says Kelly Hall, a graduate student at the Colorado School of Public Health at the University of Northern Colorado. “That’s a huge barrier to physical activity,” she says, particularly for working women who count on using the gym’s shower.
David von Storch, president and founder of Urban Adventures Companies, which runs VIDA Fitness in the District of Columbia, also says that the discomfort some LGBT people feel in gyms can be more internal than external. If he gets stares walking into a new gym, for example, as a gay man, he’s going to ask himself why. “Is it because I’m fat? Is it because I’m old? Is it because I have bad clothes? Or is it because I’m gay?” he asks. “You go through your list.”
But taking steps to engage the LGBT community in exercise is important because the community faces more health disparities than the heterosexual and cisgender — or nontransgender — population, says Hall, who’s studying transgender health equity. While there’s little research on the physical activity levels within each population of the LGBT community compared with the general population, it’s clear that transgender people are less active, she adds.
That makes sense to Jessica Whittington, a transgender yoga teacher in the District of Columbia. “If you so dislike your body, the last thing you want to do is see it or see a reflection of it somewhere; it reminds you of everything it’s not,” she says. “A lot of trans people live in their heads.”
As a result, transgender and other people in the LGBT community — who are almost three times more likely to have a mental health condition such as anxiety or depression, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness — can turn to unhealthy outlets such as drugs, alcohol or unhealthy foods to cope. “We just start finding other ways to numb out,” says Manuel, whose organization hosts online fitness classes for the LGBT community and trains exercise professionals to be more inclusive through courses like “Queering Up Fitness 101.”
In the future, Manuel would like to develop a directory or other system that identifies fitness facilities as LGBT-friendly. “I would like to see more facilities step up and say, ‘We’re here for everyone,'” he says, commending Planet Fitness in Midland, Michigan, for one, for standing up for a transgender client after a complaint about where she changed. But until then, he and others offer these tips for members of the LGBT community looking for a welcoming workout environment:
1. Seek support.
When Smith of Stonewall Fitness graduated from high school, he struggled with depression, low self-esteem and, in effect, weight gain. Then, he joined the Denver SQUIDS, a gay swim team, and life turned around. “I was working hard, I was having fun, I was meeting new friends, I lost all this weight, I was more confident in myself than I ever had been before,” Smith recalls. “It made such a profound impact in my life.”
While social support can be a key motivator for anyone to exercise, members of the LGBT community might find working out alongside others with similar experiences particularly comforting, says Whittington, who hosts regular yoga classes specifically for transgender and nonbinary communities. “A lot of the students who come from that community have dealt with so much systemic prejudice, the last place they want to find it is a place they’re coming to find their center,” she says.
Peers can also be particularly helpful in finding safe environments to get fit, adds Manuel, noting that some people may feel most comfortable calling a gym or writing an anonymous email inquiring about whether the facility has individual changing stalls, for instance. Otherwise, “it’s a lot of word of mouth,” he says.
2. Learn to love fitness.
Remember: You don’t have to join a gym to get fit. Whether it’s hiking, biking, weight-lifting or running, finding a type of physical activity you enjoy is the ticket to making exercise a lifelong habit. That’s true no matter who you are. “Find something that you enjoy doing, and then just go do it,” Smith says. “Don’t even worry about trying to lose weight or looking good, because that will come.”
Shifting the focus away from looks can particularly benefit members of the LGBT community who struggle with body image issues, Smith adds. His goal as a trainer? To help clients achieve both their physical and “subconscious” goals. “That way,” he says, “when they leave, they … feel like, ‘Wow, I really got a good workout’ and, ‘Wow, I’m really feeling good about myself , and I feel a little bit more comfortable in my skin.'”
3. Listen to your gut.
From the moment you walk in a gym’s door, you can generally tell whether it’s inclusive to all gender identities and sexual orientations, von Storch says. “When people are being genuinely welcomed and genuinely treated the same and being valued,” they notice, he says. “That sounds self-evident, but in the daily practice, I think some fitness facilities miss out on that.”
[See: 10 Signs You Should Break Up With Your Gym.]
While his company didn’t set out to launch gyms with a gay-friendly reputation, its philosophy has been to cater to the community in which the facilities reside. Fortunately, he says, while facilities catering to the gay community during the height of the AIDS epidemic were segregated and stigmatized, that’s changed. Today, he says, “if a gym has great facilities and gay people and good programming, it’s all part of making it a cool place to work out.”
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Is Your Gym LGBT-Friendly? originally appeared on usnews.com
