Why I Teach A Queer & Trans Pilates Class
By Kate Clabby

When I started practicing Pilates and yoga regularly at Innerstellar, I started to feel the healing effects of these practices very quickly. The migraines that have plagued me for over a decade diminished in frequency and intensity. Other benefits, though, took more time and attention to become apparent. There were tissues in my body that felt tense, dry, and numb. I had to spend months learning how to direct my breath into my upper back before I started to regain feeling and movement in that area. And as I did, I found myself processing old emotions that had been locked up in frozen muscle tissue for years.

I’m queer. That’s not an injury. But in the world we live in, folks who don’t fit into cisgendered and heterosexual societal norms face physical and emotional violence that takes many forms. In my case, striving to fit my sexuality into socially approved relationships caused me to disassociate from my own desire and to distrust my sensuality and my felt sense of pleasure. These are deep soul wounds that I am still working to heal, and my movement practice is an essential piece to learning to trust my body again.

One of the gifts of Pilates and yoga is that they provide tools and a platform to move from disassociation and numbness into embodiment. This can be an exquisitely vulnerable process for anyone, but especially for people who have been oppressed based on the form of their embodiment: people of color, queer folks, women, transgender, gender-nonconforming and intersex people, people with disabilities, folks whose bodies don’t fit into conventional standards of beauty or fitness, and the list goes on. Although at Innerstellar we are working hard to make our space welcoming to all people, systemic racism, homophobia and transmisogyny are pervasive forces that have a way of creeping into our most sacred spaces, our hearts and our minds.

Imagine if strangers, acquaintances and family members regularly referred to you by the wrong gender pronouns. Now imagine that the clothing most comfortable for exercise made you more vulnerable to being misgendered. Would this make you want to come to yoga or Pilates class? The binary gender assumptions that are built into our language can be hurtful and erasing to queer, transgender, and gender-nonconforming folks in any context. But in the context of a yoga or Pilates class, gendered language and incorrect assumptions about gender by teachers or other students can pull someone out of embodiment in an instant, shutting down the healing process completely. Given the emotional risks of practicing mind-body movement in a public setting, it’s not surprising that some queer folks avoid doing it at all.

With all this in mind, I asked Kiki if I could start teaching a Pilates class for the LGBTQIA ++ community. I wanted to make Pilates accessible to people who missed out on the benefits of the practice because they were uncomfortable in traditional Pilates classes. I wasn’t thinking much about myself - after all, with the privileges that come with my intersecting identities as a white, thin, able-bodied cis woman, I am comfortable in most Pilates classes.

But when we launched the class and I started teaching, something magical happened. I felt layers of self-consciousness start to drop out of my voice. I found myself speaking words I hadn’t practiced, words that bubbled up from inside me in response to what I was actually seeing and experiencing in the moment. I laughed more. My students were calling me to bring my queerness into my teaching, and in doing so, I became more fully myself.

“Queer” means something different for everyone, and it can reach into areas of selfhood beyond gender and sexuality. For me, my queerness is the part of myself that knows what works for me and how to let go of the rest. It’s also a skilled Seer, guiding me to witness people as they truly are, regardless of the labels and limits that society tries to enforce on them. So it’s no surprise that working consciously with my queerness makes me a better teacher.

Queer & Trans Pilates is open to anyone who is in dialogue with parts of themselves that defy cisgendered or heterosexual norms. It doesn’t matter whether you are out, whether you currently experience straight-passing privilege, or whether you have decided on specific words to describe your identity - this class will meet you wherever you are on your journey.

Identity-based movement spaces are not about hiding from the rest of the world, and they’re not about exclusion or segregation. They are about creating spaces where the oppressed parts of ourselves are not just allowed, but celebrated. When we hold these parts tenderly, we can learn to celebrate them throughout our daily lives, and bring our unique gifts to the world.