Queer Inclusivity in Yoga Spaces: A Personal Reflection After No Longer Passing as Straight

Even after practicing yoga and going to yoga classes for almost 10 years, and teaching for 8, I still don’t feel comfortable in most yoga spaces. I feel as if I don’t belong, and I shouldn’t be there.

Usually, when I walk into a class, I’m greeted with a similar sort of crowd. 

Mostly, everyone is a woman, or female presenting, and that comes with a similar kind of look. There’s the type of yoga class goer that wears leggings and a sports bra or lycra top, revealing their awesome abs. These yogis are thin and usually adhere to feminine expectations of having long hair, frequently tied up in a slicked back pony-tail or bun. Very ‘clean girl aesthetic’. 

In Stroud especially, there is also the more hippy earthy ‘granola girl’ yogi aesthetic. Maybe this is more bagging graphic tees and leggings, or even a flowy trouser and maybe a vest top. Maybe a nose piercing, rings, some funky tattoos, that cool messy tousled hair vibe going on. Crossing over with a surfer vibe. Maybe this class member comes in with a flask of herbal tea rather than a stanley cup of cold water. 

If you head to a mid-morning class you might also meet the middle-aged mum yogi. Sporty leggings, often ¾ length, a vest top with a racer-back, and a frenetic energy. I use the term middle-aged, but their age is visually ambiguous, somewhere between 30 and 70.

There are variations of these characters. They could be older or younger, sometimes they’re even men, but from my experience these characters reoccur. And no shade to them, I’ve tried to be, and have been, the first two and I’ll no doubt end up the third. But right now, I don’t feel like I fit in in any yoga class.

For one, I’m in a bigger body at the moment. I’m not that fussed about this, I made my peace with my body years ago, and the way she grows and changes is frankly none of my business, but I do notice the difference. I’m 5’11” and size 18. I tend to stand out in a yoga class, especially next to some of the girls I’ve described. It doesn’t matter if I slip on some leggings, an oversized tee, and some rings, I just don’t blend in with the class. Or at least it doesn’t feel like I do. 

It’s also not just that I don’t fit neatly into these categories I’ve divided yoga class goers into, I think yoga classes have a real ‘straight girl energy’ to them, that I maybe hadn’t noticed before. 

People that know me have always told me I looked gay, and yes, I probably have, but a couple of months ago I cut my hair, and now I feel less able to go ‘undercover’. I used to have lovely long hair with an undercut all the way around (yes, very gay. But I have to say that I cut my hair like this before it was a lesbian trend). The benefit of this hair style was that I still had the long bit. I could wear it down, or in a claw clip, and snuggle just close enough to femininity that I felt safe in more feminised spaces, such as within the candle-lit off-white walls of a yoga studio. But since I’ve cut my hair into a mullet (even more gay, and this time late to the trend), I’ve had nowhere to hide. 

It’s not like I was intentionally passing as straight, but I definitely used to feel more comfortable when I could. I’m also making a massive assumption that the clean-girl yogis, hippies and middle-aged mums are all straight, and no longer read me as such, which is not necessarily correct, but you can’t hypothesise without generalisations, and generally my gaydar is pretty good.

Turns out, yoga spaces are pretty heteronormative, another consequence of the infiltration of capitalism into yoga. (1) But yoga is and should be queer. Precolonial India welcomed and revered same-sex love, polyamory and gender non-conforming peoples. Yoga teaches really quite specifically that the outer Koshas, made up of our bodies, energy, thoughts, and intellect are all ever-changing, the only never-changing part of our beings is the Anandamaya Kosha/Atman/True Self. The soul, if you like. And since all we really are, and we must let go of everything else, is pure existence, gender, binaries, and all that other stuff is pretty irrelevant.

One conclusion is that maybe I should let go of feeling out of place, since it is based on a divide that doesn’t truly exist. And while this is true, the larger problem is what yoga has become in the west. A mess I don’t have time to deal with here. A symptom of this mess is that queer people like me are excluded from a practice that should be ours as well. Maybe not explicitly excluded, and I must reiterate, the actual people in a class have always made me feel welcomed, but I’ve never felt as if I have fit in. Or maybe more precisely, that I belong in a yoga studio or yoga class… and I’m a yoga teacher!

Something about yoga classes, whether it’s the majority clientele, or the majority of teachers, or the associations of the aesthetics of a studio, make me feel as though the space isn’t mine. And that I shouldn’t be there.

Yoga should be accessible to all people, but it is rigidly stuck with one, or maybe three, types of people, and makes others feel unable or unwilling to engage with it. I mean, if I’m still feeling put off after almost 10 years, how much guts do you need to try for the first time!?

Yoga is for everyone, so how do we make it so?

(1) A note on cishet monogamy and capitalism - Heterosexual cisgendered monogamy is required for capitalism because capitalism relies on the nuclear family for reproduction of the work force (children) and free domestic support (a wife) otherwise the worker (husband) is unable to work enough hours and remain in peak condition.