Before Ilya Parker could start his gender transition and begin the next, long-awaited phase of his life, his doctor gave him a miserable prescription.
Parker would have to “lose at least 50 pounds” before he could even think about hormone replacement therapy, which would help him transition to a more traditionally masculine physique.
Fifty pounds is a high bar for anyone to meet, but it was a particular obstacle for Parker who, at the time of his transition, was struggling with severe depression and body dysmorphia. Living in the rural South, he didn’t have a trans-friendly gym nearby. Parker hired several different personal trainers, but they only wanted to “reinforce” traditional gendered fitness aesthetics.
“Hormones was all I wanted to do,” Parker told Mashable, so he stopped searching and decided to become a trainer. Parker obtained a degree in physical therapy and became certified in medical exercise training. He shed the 50 pounds, gathered all the tools he gained along the way, and brought them to the place where they could be most useful — Instagram.
Personal fitness training is a $9 billion dollar industry, with online fitness training taking up an increasing share of the market. Online training offers consumers the individualized nagging many newcomers to fitness require, often at a lower cost than offered by gyms. And a growing, if still relatively tiny, percentage of those trainers are trans and non-binary, who are able to cater to demographics previously considered out of reach.
“Many trainers intentionally exclude trans/non-binary folks in their practice, or attempt to restrict how we show up in the world,” Parker said, and he wanted to change that.
To get a size of the market, head over to Instagram. Unlike YouTube, Instagram’s hashtags make searching — and finding highly specific, personalized, non-garbage pages — relatively economical. Instead of posting only videos, which are laborious to produce, trainers can build substantive followings with properly filtered photos. All of the fitness trainers I spoke with said they built their pages the old school social media way, by using the right trans and non-binary specific hashtags. A few shirtless and booty shots may have, uh, also helped.
“Many trainers intentionally exclude trans/non-binary folks in their practice”
That has helped them build big followings. Jesse Diamond, a transgender NASM certified fitness trainer in Nashville, has an audience of over 28,000. Shawn Stinson, a personal trainer and competitive bodybuilder, has an audience of almost 15,000. In the Instagram world, these are relatively modest audiences, but engagement is high and the number of trainers, multiplying.
Services that actually, you know, make a difference
There are multiple reasons why trans and non-binary folks might want to work with trainers who resemble them, but somewhere near the top of that list has to be the gyms themselves. Traditional gyms are formidable and boring for pretty much everyone who isn’t an athlete, aka, all of us. Ilya Parker’s trans and non-binary clients experience this exclusion even more acutely.
“Just imagine how this intimidation can be magnified for trans and non-binary folks who are ‘visible,'” Parker said. “Their safety is often compromised. They may have difficulty accessing the locker rooms that align with their gender. Staff and gym goers may be rude and disrespectful to them, especially if they are going alone.”
As of this publication, there is currently one — one! — gym in the entire United States that serves queer, trans and non-binary people, Everybody Gym in Los Angeles. Head anywhere outside of that area and you’d be lucky if your gym dedicated one class to the LGBTQ community. You’d be freaking blessed if that class also wasn’t overcrowded, a zillion miles from your house and reprehensibly corny.
Trans and non-binary trainers who work online are able to virtually, however imperfectly, minimize those geographic gaps.
“Online services have been particularly helpful with allowing for folks in remote areas with little to no queer/trans support networks to access my services when it is convenient to them,” Parker said.
Jesse Diamond sees it in his own practice. Diamond is a transgender personal trainer who, thanks to his popular Instagram account, is able to work with trans and non-binary clients from all over the world. His clients, who range in age from 15-50, come from places as diverse as Thailand to Malaysia to Canada.
“In most of the country, odds are that a trans person isn’t going to… find any trainers who work with trans individuals. It’s possible they don’t even a know trans person in real life,” Diamond said.
Diamond has a specialized knowledge most other trainers just, well, don’t. He’s able to tailor specific exercises for trans people who are “fighting genetics harder than the average person,” Diamond said.
“It’s possible they don’t even a know trans person in real life”
“They often need to transform their bodies more than the average fitness person would,” Diamond explained. “You cannot change bone structure. You need someone who understands how hormones work.”
Even the most sympathetic cisgender trainers, having not undergone the process themselves and with little research publicly available, may not understand the impact hormone replacement therapy can have. Estrogen and testosterone influences everything from where fat is stored to the rate at which muscle is developed. Hormone replacement therapy is a frequently unpredictable undertaking, requiring constant monitoring and regulation (and money). Diamond obsessively plans his clients’ workouts with all of these variables in mind, and tries to remind them of the big picture: they’re doing this for themselves and nobody else.
“Endorphins [released by exercise] make you happy …. Tune out the rest of the world. Don’t look at the other people,” Diamond said.
At the heart of both Diamond and Parker’s practice however, aren’t the schedules they plan or the diet regimens they organize, but the relationships they build.
Building a community, one Instagram follow at a time
California resident Shae Scott used to be one of Diamond’s clients. The two of them played rugby together in college before Scott found him on Instagram and Diamond started training him. As a young trans guy, Scott needed someone he could talk to about his body without risk of rejection.
“I felt more comfortable working with him. He had been through it. He helped me with the mental aspect, with my chest. The program I got from him really helped me stay accountable and … It was just really cool to have somebody,” Scott said.
Scott decided to become a trainer himself. “It was really motivating for me to take control of me and build the body I wanted without having to wait for surgery.”
His company, which he calls Free The Mind (FTM, if you get the wordplay), is strongly relationship-based — and while most trainers will “preach” the relationship approach, Scott sees it as central to the type of clients he serves. It can take years before his trans and non-binary clients “complete” their gender transition, if ever. Scott wants to be with them along the way — as a trainer, as a friend of sorts, and someone they can connect to online, even if it’s just through the MyFitnessPal app.
“It was really motivating for me to take control of me and build the body I wanted without having to wait for surgery.”
Parker himself is currently training a non-binary trans person of color with cerebral palsy, now just beginning hormone replacement therapy. The client is anxious that they won’t be able to get access to the care they need. Like Scott, Parker performs a kind of emotional labor other trainers frequently can’t or won’t provide.
“We have weekly Skype sessions where I remind them that they are not alone in this world. They have space to ask questions, work through challenges, and add healing based practices into their daily life,” Parker said.
This digital community has evolved into a special group of support and respect. Diamond trained Scott. Scott is now training others. Both follow Parker. They all know RufioAndPack. And everyone has something of an online fitness trainer fanbase, even when their followers are just there for the booty pics (as a few fans disclosed to me multiple times).
This is a resource people rely on. And like all good things, it barely has enough resources to work.
Addressing one awkward imbalance at a time
For all of its democratic slogans, online fitness training is largely a luxury good. Most of us can barely afford Planet Fitness’ monthly membership fees, even with the free pizza thrown in. Trans Americans are four times more likely to live in poverty. 34 percent of black trans folks live in extreme poverty. Paid fitness training is painfully out of reach for most, as much as empathetic trainers try to adjust their fees.
“I’d like to add that as a person who exists at multiple intersections of oppression (black, non binary, older, in the rural south), I am doing this work with very little access to resources,” Parker said. “I train many of my clients at little to no cost to them because I believe in them and this work. I desperately need the support of my community.”
Finance is just one (huge) part of the problem. There are other gaps as well. Most of the trainers you’ll find on Instagram tend to be trans men, or somewhere on the masculine side of the spectrum. Part of this is structural — society tends to value musculature in men and stigmatize it in women. There’s likely a larger demand. Still, there are few available resources for transfeminine folks who want to build a more traditionally feminine body, with or without hormones.
Parker, Diamond, and Scott are all confident the fitness community can change — with enough resources and enough time. Diamond wants to train more would-be trainers. Scott wants to expand his geographic reach. Parker is asking that allies support the businesses of queer and trans people of color.
“Our most marginalized need to be leading the movements that will get us closer to liberation in this lifetime,” Parker said. “We are helping each other to heal.”
