Yes, I know there are multiple platforms that allow people to connect in on line virtual environments, but I do really like Zoom and I love the opportunities to play with the word “zoom” and popular culture. Like the title of this post for example, riffing on the Talking Head’s song, Life During War Time.

But to get down to brass tacks (does anyone ever use that phrase or is it just me?), or to use the words of the immortal Aretha Franklin, who’s zooming who these days and why?

Most of us use online platforms for work and play. We can connect with friends and family, we can sign up for all manner of courses from quilting and cheese tasting to yoga and pouring acrylic. The possibilities are endless. I myself have been using online environments to learn new quilt techniques, to plan and deliver on different projects, and to connect with far flung friends and nearby colleagues.

There has been some research on the impact of all this zooming, teaming (Microsoft), meeting (Google) and Facetiming (Facebook) to name a few. National Geographic produced an extensive look at the impact of what it called “Zoom Fatigue” on humans. The magazine concluded virtual interactions are hard on the brain. Here’s why:

Zoom gloom: Humans communicate even when they’re quiet. During an in-person conversation, the brain focuses partly on the words being spoken, but it also derives additional meaning from dozens of non-verbal cues, such as whether someone is facing you or slightly turned away, if they’re fidgeting while you talk, or if they inhale quickly in preparation to interrupt.

In the virtual environment we tax the brain and that leads to fatigue. We can reduce the fatigue by turning off the camera or by switching to the telephone and walking outside at the same time.

What about meetings that require a video component? Throughout the pandemic I have been signing up for courses on how to deliver training in virtual environments. So along with the fatigue that comes from the brain trying to manage various signals, in training sessions, we are also asking the brain to take on something new.

I’ve learnt a lot about ice breakers, how to manage introductions (especially when you have several pages of screens of tiny blocks representing individual people), and how to chunk up your content so it isn’t all talking, all slides, all the time.

Recently I had a breakthrough in a learning session. I couldn’t figure out why I felt so perky after a two hour class. Yes, the facilitator chunked up the content; yes, there was prep work beforehand so we could get comfy with various creative tools; and yes, we had small, medium, and large breakout sessions with fun exercises.

It came to me that the facilitator included an exercise in each class that required us to move. I usually give people a 15-minute break to step away from the screen, to get a drink of water or a snack. I have even suggested they take a quick stroll outside.

But how do I know people in my sessions actually do what I recommend? I don’t. Chances are they are checking their emails, responding to a family (human or animal) need etc.

In both sessions, after our short break, we did an exercise: one involved mirroring the movements of another person on the screen (it didn’t matter who) for about a minute and half. Another asked people to make a pose and three people got numbers. The leader mixed up the numbers and we replicated what each number represented. The leader got faster and faster and then we collapsed in laughter.

In both examples, this embodied exercise shifted focus and restored energy. If you study or follow Chinese (and other Eastern cultures) medicine, the concept of chi, or energy flow, is very important. Practitioners of tai chi use particular movements to restore balance and redirecting energy flow to different parts of the body.

Do you have to do this only in a group? I don’t think so. As an experiment, I turned off my camera on a recent video call. I spent a minute just playing the online version of Simon Says from my last class by myself. The 60 seconds of movement re-shifted my focus enough that I could return to my call and pay attention. I’ll probably try this more often to give myself an energy boost instead of grabbing another cup of coffee and I am definitely incorporating it into my online meetings and training sessions.

What about you: how are you managing with zoom fatigue?

MarthaFitAt55 lives in St. John’s and works pretty well anywhere the ether will take her.

The Transgender Day of Remembrance falls at the end of Transgender Awareness Week this year. Here at Fit is A Feminist Issue we are marking the day by making space to remember those who lost their lives from transphobia.

This week Nicole and Cate both shared insights from transgender individuals about their experiences, especially within the fitness realm. Nicole shared a link on being an effective ally at the end of her interview with Jordon. This link here gives useful tips on how to create a welcoming environment that also focuses on safety (the website also has it available in French). Take a look at your workplace and your own personal space to see what steps you can take to ensure translives are affirmed, respected and recognized.

I recently became aware that it is Transgender Week of Awareness in Canada, which takes place during the week of November 13-19 this year.

Transgender Awareness Week brings trans people and their allies together to learn more about advancing advocacy.

I am committed to being an ally, and educating myself about how to do so in the best way, to any group that is seeking equality and facing oppression. This is not limited to being a trans ally. But this topic is near and dear to my heart, because one of my favourite people is a transgender woman. I was 22 when Jordan was born and she was one of the first babies I spent a lot of time with as an adult. Jordan gave me the nickname “Auntie Uh-Uh” because I sang Barney’s “if all the raindrops were lemon drops and gum drops, oh what a rain it would be”, and then you stick your tongue and sing “uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh”. Jordan liked to do my hair and play along with the children’s TV show Comfy Couch.

It has been a privilege to watch Jordan grow up and discover her true identity. She has always been an old soul and we have always had a special bond. When she told me that she is a transgender woman when she was 19, it did not come as a surprise to me. I believe I said something to the effect of “you are Jordan and I love you”. And then she told me more about her self-discovery process.

Jordan is now 26 and she is more inspiring than ever. I have watched, with admiration, as she has taken steps to become more comfortable in her body. She has done so with grace, determination and maturity beyond her years. I also know that it has not always been easy. I am sadly aware of the discrimination she can face, on occasion, from people who do not understand, or who “other” people they do not understand. In this respect, my instinct is to make sure she is OK and support her. I also feel it is partly my responsibility to help educate other people, when they are willing to learn, about the transgender experience. I would like to help people understand that transgender people are just like your friends and family members who you have known your whole life and who are the same people inside, regardless of how they express their gender. There is nothing frightening or strange about it if you take the time to understand. If nothing else, I hope people can learn to lead with kindness when facing something they do not understand and respect the wishes of the people involved who are asking for respect.

When I thought about writing something about Transgender Week of Awareness, for this blog, naturally I thought of Jordan, but also that the post should relate to the topic of the blog, which of course is feminist fitness and wellness. The gym is not always a comfortable or safe place for the trans community. This is an issue that has inspired many gyms across North America to create LGBTQ2-positive spaces. Alistair wrote about fitness as a trans man, for the blog, earlier today.

I asked Jordan questions about her experience at the gym and also if there is anything she would like to say about Transgender Week of Awareness. She graciously answered my questions below.

Nicole: How has your experience been at the gym?

Jordan: As a transgender woman going to the gym, my experience hasn’t always been easy…It has taken me years (four to be exact) to get to a place where I felt comfortable as well as familiar with my surroundings. At first it was really hard, because I wasn’t on hormones, I was a little more aware of my body, the gym clothes I could wear in comparison to other girls, and the right amount of makeup that I felt I needed to wear to feel passible while still appropriate for the gym. Over the years, since I have started on hormones, I can wear less face makeup and also have become a bit more familiar with my surroundings, so the novelty of being there and being transgender has faded. I like to keep to myself mostly at the gym, but I have acquired a few acquaintances in the changeroom – women who wave and we chat about our lives briefly – none of them caring about the news of my transgender-ness , just happy to see a familiar face – as it should be.

Nicole: Are there thoughts you would like to share about Trans Week of Awareness?

Jordan: Its great that Trans Week of Awareness exists, to help educate and shine light on the needs of the community. I am happy to live in a world where I am seeing change – slowly but surely – through lived experience as well as though the media. We have come so far as a group of people and a culture, being visible and accessible. However, there is a lot of work to be done still in the world.

I thank Jordan for sharing her thoughts for the blog.

If people are interested, here is a link to some great resources from The519 about being a trans ally: https://www.the519.org/education-training/training-resources/our-resources/creating-authentic-spaces/being-an-effective-trans-ally.

It’s Trans Awareness Week, and like Nicole, I wanted to bring in a voice we don’t usually hear on this blog. I interviewed my dear friend Alistair via email; most of this post is his words.

First, just a brief introduction?

I’m Alistair, I’m one of your friends and I’m a white trans guy with passing privilege, and a chronic disabling illness. I’m 40, for perspective.

Can you tell me a little bit about how your relationship to fitness has been related to your experience of being trans?   

Growing up, I wasn’t involved in organized sports, but I was involved in dance and theatre as a young kid.  As I approached puberty, my only experiences with fitness came in the form of PE class, which was uncomfortable for me – I was Very Bad at Being A Girl, and sex-segregated environments always left me feeling like an alien, though I didn’t understand why at the time.

I came out as a lesbian at 19 and presented in a progressively more butch fashion as time went on. The first time I experienced fitness in a positive way was in the explicitly feminist environment of the Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Club in the early 2000s.  Founded by a queer woman as a body-positive female boxing club, this was a space in which my larger, study body became an asset – in boxing, the more mass you have, the more force you can deliver at the end of a punch.

When I joined the group of amateur boxers training to compete, the dynamics of the gendered space became inescapable; on the weekends when the recreational classes happened, the Newsgirls were the only people in the boxing gym. On weeknights, the competitors shared space with an almost entirely male boxing club. We constantly had to assert ourselves to maintain our space to work out, or we would be gradually squeezed away from the equipment and floorspace. We also learned to constantly watch out for each other, because while people like me were mostly invisible, feminine-presenting women attracted a lot of attention from the boxing club guys, and usually not in a good way.

Life factors and injury resulted in a drift away from the boxing gym. I gradually put on weight over the next five years or so while physical fitness took a back seat to other things, exacerbated by the fact that I wasn’t comfortable in any fitness space available to me (university athletic centre, YMCA, commercial gyms). My gender presentation became increasingly masculine, and wearing a chest binder was not, for me, compatible with exercise (constriction, temperature increase, chafing as sweating happened, etc etc.) As a visibly queer, masculine-presenting woman (at the time) I got harassed in women’s bathrooms enough that even considering using changerooms was always extremely difficult.

What, if anything, has shifted since you transitioned?

When I came out as trans at 32 and began to transition, those spaces were out of reach entirely. There was a “family changeroom” that was available at the Y but you had to ask for access to it, which never felt good to me – once you start being read as male, you need to be careful about entering spaces designated ‘family’ if you don’t have children with you. Once I started testosterone, my voice and facial hair started to change, but I didn’t feel safe in the mens’ rooms either. I’m a sweaty person, so changing after working out isn’t something I can skip, and at the time I was reliant on public transit so it would be a long ride home in wet clothes.

My first partial access to fitness settings came after I had completely healed from my top surgery (double mastectomy with reconstruction). Getting rid of the chest binder let me at least take a full breath while exercising, and having a flat chest made changing in the mens’ room possible, if not always comfortable.

I’m extremely lucky in that I have passing privilege now – I’m always read as male by people I interact with. In fact, most of the time people think I’m a straight white cis man, which is its own kind of uncomfortable. Even my overweight body isn’t othered, because the rules are different for men. In any context that doesn’t involve genitals or taking off clothes, I’m almost always safe.

What are you doing now for movement?

I didn’t find a fitness modality that works for me until earlier this year, and it turned out to be one I never would have expected: a kind of dude-yoga developed by a former professional wrestler who severely injured his back doing pro wrestler things and was desperate to save his career. He didn’t go back to pro wrestling, but his yoga-without-the-woo system developed a life of its own, with workouts accessible via DVD or app. It’s yoga with an emphasis on isometric exercise: increasing your heart rate by maintaining full-body muscle tension while holding poses and moving through series (use of a heart-rate monitor is encouraged so you can tell how hard you’re working). Most importantly, it is endlessly modifiable no matter what your level of fitness, injury, size, or disability – seriously, there’s a series of workouts for people who can’t get out of bed. The founder has a big, barky personality that’s not to everybody’s taste, but he is also surprisingly positive and gentle in attitude, and the guided workout clips are full of unexpected pep talks while you’re sweating through a plank pose.

This system seems to work for me in a bunch of ways that others haven’t.  As a person who was once operating at a much higher level of fitness, I tend to get warmed up, think “oh this is good, I can do more” and then overdo it and can’t move for two days, so systems like Crossfit that exalt maximum effort aren’t a good fit for me. This is the opposite, embracing the idea that something is better than nothing, and that consistency leads to slow incremental improvement. So, if I overdo it one day, I can increase the modifications the next day but still complete the workout, giving me the benefits of movement and exercise, and perhaps most importantly, I can experience success and a feeling of accomplishment.  Another incredibly important factor is that I can do this at home by myself, where I can pause if I need to, I don’t have to wear a shirt, there’s nobody to see me shaking and walrusing around on my yoga mat, and I don’t have to use the mental and physical energy to go to a different location and be around people.

What do you pay attention to to determine if a space is welcoming or safe for you to work out or do a sport in?  (Suddenly I’m reminded of your axe-throwing bachelor party). 

Safe space can be really tricky, and there’s a complicated sort of calculus around safety. Vibe is a key if difficult-to-define factor — is it “girl power” or feminist? Are there safe space signs and symbols (triangles, rainbows*, explicit statements of safe space or ‘everybody is welcome here’)? What does the staff look like? Do people have pronouns on their nametags? Most importantly, are there individual spaces available for changing and showering, and do you have to ask for access to those spaces?

*This is why I have a big problem with people appropriating the rainbow for “we’re all in this pandemic together.” That symbol already has a specific meaning, and it’s a critical safety indicator for some people.

I’m safe in my passing privilege, until I’m not.  My top surgery scars have faded and I’m furry enough that they’re not terribly obvious, but that doesn’t help me if I accidentally drop my packer (prosthetic penis) while I’m trying to change out of my wet bathing suit quickly and facing a corner (believe me, silicone bounces).Bathrooms are ok, until the stall doors don’t lock, or there’s no toilet seat, or twenty-seven urinals and one stall (I’m looking at you, Rogers Centre), or everything in sight is covered in urine and there’s no toilet paper. Men are generally fairly good at minding their own business in bathrooms – thanks, latent homophobia! – compared to the policing that happens in women’s spaces, but the threat is always there. NB, this is nothing compared to the dangers that trans women face in bathrooms.

What one thing do you wish people knew or understood about what it means to navigate health and fitness as a trans person?

I have two things. 

First: private spaces for anytime nakedness is involved are critical, and they need to be freely accessible.  That lone one-person bathroom stall or ‘family changeroom’ isn’t available to me if I need to ask Ryan at the front desk for the key, outing myself in the process.

Second: There are as many ways to be trans* as there are trans* people, but for lots of us, transition isn’t so much an event as it is a mode of existence. I came out as trans and began my transition eight years ago; I told people to call me Alistair, I legally changed my name and gender marker, I started hormone replacement therapy and had top surgery because those were the right decisions for me and I was lucky enough to have access to them. However, I’d still be trans* if some or all of those things hadn’t happened.

Eight years later my body is still changing, and I can’t say that my transition is complete because I may decide to have further interventions later. I’m in a constant state of becoming – I think we all are, but for some of us it’s more explicit.

Thank you so much… please write more for us!

My mornings usually start by putting on the kettle for a strong cup of tea. As my tea steeps, I putter around: letting the dog out, making breakfast, taking my meds, the usual morning stuff. Then I sit down to drink my (very strong) tea and eat breakfast before doing my work.

But, I always have trouble moving from first-thing-in-the-morning mode into start-my-work mode. Part of the issue is that I work from home (I know lots of people recognize the inherent challenges in that these days), and I work for myself, so the beginning of my day is not clearly defined. I can dawdle over my tea or I can do a load of laundry, or whatever before starting work.

Given my ADHD, that’s a dangerous zone for me. It’s all too easy to lose time and discover that it is way past time to be at my desk. Once the start of my work day gets thrown off, I can end up feeling off-balance all day.

Obviously, that’s no fun. So, for ages, I have been experimenting with ways to make the transition from home to work a little clearer.

And, lately, I have found help from a strange source – delayed caffeine. 

A few weeks ago, I was rereading part of Daniel Pink’s book ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing’ and I noticed that he recommends not having caffeine first thing in the morning.  The reasoning behind this as follows:

“The moment we awaken, our bodies begin producing cortisol, a stress hormone that kickstarts our groggy souls. But it turns out that caffeine interferes with the production of cortisol – so starting the day immediately with a cup of coffee barely boosts our wakefulness. Worse, early-morning coffee increases our tolerance for caffeine, which means we must gulp every more to obtain its benefits.” (p.46)

The solution according to Pink is to have your caffeine an hour or so after waking up because your cortisol has kicked in by then and the caffeine will have an added effect. 

So, I’ve given it a try for the past couple of weeks and I’ve noticed a real change in how I feel in the mornings. 

It’s a little difficult to describe but there is a definite difference. 

My shift from first-thing grogginess to being fully awake is more gradual and the process just feels better.

And since my caffeine infusion is coming later in my morning routine, it is no longer the marker of ‘time to have breakfast.’ Instead, it has become the marker of ‘time to start work’ and I am finding it easier to get to my desk.

The caffeine right before work might be part of the reason it has been easier to get started but the improvement might just be because of the change in routine.

Either way, I feel better about my mornings – the way I wake up and the way I start work- and that has increased my overall sense of well-being.

That’s definitely worth waiting an hour for my tea.

How do you feel about caffeine first thing?

Would you ever experiment with delaying that first cup?