Lesbian Gym Lockdown: Submitting to the Gym Queen

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When I went to other people’s houses I would find them extraordinarily suffocating and conventional. There’d be this ghastly father who was a boring old fart and a mother who was terribly uptight,” she recalls. “I was glad to go home to the laughter and fun. There was a lot more conversation, and I had a lot more access to my parents than my friends did to theirs. I could say what I wanted as well.” If you’re anything like me, you like learning about fitness… while you’re doing fitness (#HowLiftersRun). When you’re figuring out what strength sports podcasts to listen to, navigating the terrain can be tough — there’s some low key transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny out there. The following podcasts will give you excellent strength sports stories and tips, all while providing your daily dose of queer joy. The Queer Fitness Podcast I was in a race against my coach one day,” she explained. “Instead of congratulating me afterward, all he said was how huge my arms looked while running.” Although that situation didn’t single-handedly spawn the idea for Uplift, she began hearing similar stories from fellow female runners—how men were commenting on their bodies and making working out an uncomfortable experience—which prompted her to start organizing and coaching running groups strictly for women. LGBTQ+ communities in strength sports are abundant — you just have to know where to look. The lists above are by no means exhaustive, so keep searching for more and keep creating queer lifting communities of your own, wherever you are.

Gina says she feels “immensely proud and impressed by the work and the commitment [behind the documentary] and still astonished by the interest and love that people have for the Gateways and how they remember it. We didn’t even know how we became friends, let alone best friends. Attending anatomy classes together and spending long hours over big fat books inside an eerie library decorated with skeletons brings people closer. It helped that we both came from a small town and were staying in the same hostel. One day I told her how much I love drawing and would like to sketch her. She stared at me for long before agreeing to be by muse. But that came with one condition—she wanted to see me naked. She thought I wanted to draw her nude (and I didn’t correct her). The amazingly done body paint made Sarah and Maria appears wearing innocent leggings and workout bras. It’s so realistic that some unsuspecting people didn’t even noticed the difference. All-time powerlifting record holder and trans legend Janae Marie is definitely an athlete to look up to for her raw strength on and off the platform. Shawn StinsonYes, we took a shower together. We did not have sex. The thought of touching her never crossed my mind although we stood next to each other for thirty long minutes under a shower.

She was 13 when she discovered for the first time about the club’s clientele and purpose. “It was Sunday lunchtime and my mother and I were washing up after lunch. She said: ‘I want to talk to you about something because you’re going to hear about this at school. You do know what the club is, don’t you?’ I said: ‘What do you mean?It’s a club,’ and she said: ‘It’s a lesbian club, Gina.’ But we were not prepared for what followed. Next day as we reached college, we knew something was different. Did people stare at us for a little longer than necessary? Did the girls stopped talking when we reached the stuffy common room? We had no idea. Founded to advocate and fundraise for trans powerlifters, Pull for Pride is dedicated to encouraging all lifters and federations to #ShareThePlatform with trans athletes. When you love deadlifting and equity in sports — and how could you not? — Pull for Pride has got you covered. Athlete Ally

Florida Man Catches and “Recycles” Alligator in Driveway

He lived in Cheyne Walk, and would pass by the Gateways to get to the King’s Road. “And my mum would be outside, taking deliveries, doing the laundry or whatever, and she said that he used to stop and talk quite often. If you’re a trans bodybuilder or powerlifter in the US, the International Association of Trans Bodybuilders and Powerlifters is a lifting community and annual competition in Atlanta, Georgia designed just for you. The world’s first trans bodybuilding competition was hosting by IATBP in 2014, and (with a gap in 2020 because of COVID) hosts both bodybuilding and powerlifting competitions every October. Starting secondary school, tomboy suddenly became “lesbian”. Wanting to wear a pair of Adidas poppers to “no uniform” day at school made me a lesbian. Having a haircut like Phil Neville made me a lesbian. Wanting to watch and play sport with the boys, wanting to grow muscles so I could be better at sport, all added up to me being called a lesbian. The LGBT SportSafe Inclusion Program is dedicated to educating administrators on the needs of LGBTQ+ student-athletes — yes, including strength athletes. Queer coaches and administrators, too, need support in athletics, and LGBT SportSafe is meant to provide both education and community for all these folks. GLSEN’s Transgender Inclusion in High School Athletics One of the victims said to the defendant, 'You have just bumped into my car again,' but he replied, 'Am I bothered?' He then said, 'You are the f**king weirdos you pair of fat c**ts.' Later the exact same set of circumstances happened again with the cars.

Neatly, it was a story in this newspaper about The Killing of Sister George and the club that persuaded Gina’s mother to explain. The OUTFoundation isn’t a gym itself, but the LGBTQ+ fitness org can help you find inclusive gyms (and trainers) near you — both IRL and online. If you want to learn from and work out with LGBTQ+ trainers during the pandemic, The OUTfoundation is featuring Zoom fitness classesby different LGBTQ+ instructors each week (as part of a campaign that is called, naturally, #werkfromhome). The OUTFoundation’s inclusive gym locator will also help you find a queer-friendly gym near you, so you don’t have to take those terrifying first steps into a potentially queer-phobic club without having your homework done for you in advance. The more LGBTQ+ people experience interpersonal and structural queerphobia, the worse LGBTQ+ mental health becomes, according to The Trevor Project’s 2019 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health. As fitness lovers have long-since known, working out can be very useful for improving your mental health (despite those paradoxical days when your mental health makes working out feel impossible).Powerlifter and co-director of Pull for Pride JayCee Cooper is responsible for extensive advocacy for trans and nonbinary powerlifters, as well as some pretty badass lifting. Rob Kearney

As a transmasculine powerlifter — with a bunch of trans friends who lift — I know that the empowerment that comes from getting under a barbell that weighs much more than you is… immense. If you’ve lifted and have loved it, no matter your gender, you probably know the sensation of literal empowerment I’m talking about. For me and a bunch of trans lifting pals, strength sports create a connection with your body that is more about what you can do than what you can look like or what gender people assume you are. For me, lifting has massively decreased my dysphoria, which is another great advantage of lifting for trans folks. Community-Building Sport should be about representing all different types of women no matter their sexuality, or how they present themselves. It should not be about who you are in a relationship with or what you look like. Ultimately the only thing you should be judged on is your sporting performance and whether you are a good team-mate.We all go through phases in life when we are curious about a lot of things—a girl may be curious about the body of another girl, but that doesn’t make her a lesbian, even if they take a bath together. I never wanted to know why she wished to see me naked. We never chose that moment to step into the bathroom of a girl's hostel together. We did it because we were curious. Like many women, Shear is no stranger to rude—even crude—comments from men in athletic situations. She told me about a particularly unnerving instance from her early running days in New York. Topics ranging from anti-racism in queer sports and all-around LGBTQ+ athletics are what you’ll get from the Outsports Podcast — if you want to learn your queer sports history and keep up with the most up-to-date news about trans athletes, tune into this one. LGBTQ+ Lifters, Unite