When I first started Queerflex
I had a small board of three.
It was my wife and my two best friends and
I was like, "Hey, y'all I wanna start this
thing, but I need to have a board.
Will you be on the board?
I don't know."
The name of Queerflex got into
the community, what we were doing got into
the community, and things really picked up.
We went from just myself to myself and the
board and myself, and now we have three trainers,
a massage therapist, a counselor, we're working
with a dietician.
Then we are also doing a lot of community
work with another clear and allied supporting
fitness business called In Your Boots.
A lot of times people look at
me and they don't necessarily think, "Oh,
there's a queer person, oh there's a non-binary
person, there's a trans person."
They don't necessarily think that when they
look at me.
Movement has always been a big
piece of how I connect with myself.
Through a lot of different things that have
happened in my life, that centering of movement
kind of fluxed.
I found that the more I started to explore
pieces of my queer identity, the less that
I wanted to move my body because it was bringing
stuff up for me.
I realized that I had to move my body or that
trauma and those thoughts and those feelings
that I was holding inside of me weren't gonna
go anywhere except deeper inside of me and
make me not well.
Started to get back in touch
with moving my body through yoga first.
I dropped out of university when I was in
the midst of doing my social work diploma,
I went down to Calgary.
I got sober down there and I also did a certification
in yoga teacher training.
It was through that that I started to connect
with my body more.
It was through that process that I started
to really understand myself as being non-binary.
The more that I got into the fitness side
of things and the more that I started living
in what I felt to be my truest physical form,
the more barriers started coming up for me
in the fitness world.
I found myself again wanting
to push away from moving my body and from
being in fitness.
The more I started to connect with community
and talk to them about the importance of movement,
and wellness, and fitness, and coming to understand
and reconcile feelings with their own bodies,
the more I started to see that I wasn't alone
in those things that I was experiencing in
typical gym spaces.
It's a combination of my own experiences and
my own story and path, and those share with
me by the community that brought me to where
I am today with Queerflex.
We have been lucky enough to
team up with two local fitness supply companies,
Apple Fitness Store and TYDAX Fitness.
They have generously donated over $18,000
worth of equipment to our new space.
I try to do as much feedback as I can with
people who access Queerflex services and one
of the things that people explicitly stated
is that they always want this to be something
that's by and for the queer community.
So we do prioritize hiring queer, trans and
non-binary people.
We've got classes running six
days a week and then on Saturdays is when
we do most of our additional wellness services.
A piece of feedback that I've heard from the
community about maybe why some folks stay
away is that they think that they wanna leave
space for other people who need it more.
Some people saying that they don't know if
they're queer enough to come to Queerflex.
To that I say, if you identify as queer in
any way, queer is a very broad, roomy umbrella
term in my opinion.
If you identify as queer in any way, there
is space for you here, 100%.
The more who show up, the more that we can
show to funders how much this is something
that is needed in the community, which means
the more sustainable this will be and the
longer Queerflex will be around.
We do come from a health at every size perspective in the way that we do
our work.
All of our staff are constantly working towards
ways to understand what it means to be trauma
informed in our practices, in the way that
we work with people.
I'm Kyle Fairall, my pronouns
are they and them, and I'm the executive director
and founder of Queerflex.
Kyle and Tony and the rest of team
make us really family here and we feel we're
at home.
I found, as someone that's not
really buff or anything like that, doing the
small weights with these big, buff, gym muscle-people,
where they just feel like ... They kind of
look at you of like, "Oh, you're only using
the 10-pound weight."
And they're grunting and groaning and even
though you can express yourself, you still
feel uncomfortable.
Me, I'm kind of really excited
going every session.
Trying to find new friends within the LGBTQ
family and really hoping that more LGBTQ will
find this space kind of like a home, a second
home for them for their fitness.
Your identity and your body
are valid and if those things are true then
any form of movement is also valid.
Where you are at today with how you understand
or experience your body or your identity or
the way that you move through the world, is
perfect.
It's perfect.
Whether it's flawed, however you might feel
about it, it's where you're at today and it's
okay, yeah.
