Most fitness apps added a pronoun field sometime around 2022 and called it inclusion. A dropdown. Three options. Maybe a custom text field if they were feeling generous. Then the app proceeds to sort you into "male programming" or "female programming" and never thinks about it again.
That's not inclusion. That's a checkbox.
Here's what I actually care about as someone who built a fitness coaching app: does your coach understand what's happening in your body right now?
The Pronoun Field Is Table Stakes
Body by AI asks for your pronouns during onboarding. It also asks for a chosen name — the name you want your coach to use, which might be different from whatever's on your credit card. Your coach addresses you correctly every single time. That's the bare minimum. I'm not going to pretend it's revolutionary.
What matters is what happens after the pronoun field.
HRT Changes Everything — And Most Apps Ignore It
If you're on testosterone HRT, your basal metabolic rate is shifting. Your body composition is changing. Your capacity for muscle protein synthesis is increasing over months and years. Your recovery patterns are evolving. A fitness app that doesn't account for this is giving you bad advice — not because it's malicious, but because it literally cannot see you.
The same is true for estrogen HRT. Fat redistribution patterns change. Lean mass dynamics shift. The relationship between the number on the scale and what's actually happening in your body becomes even more complicated than it already was (and it was already pretty complicated).
Body by AI uses the Katch-McArdle formula for BMR — that's 370 + (21.6 × lean body mass in kg). It doesn't use the generic "male" or "female" Harris-Benedict multipliers that most calorie calculators rely on. Katch-McArdle cares about your lean body mass, not your sex assignment. That means as your body composition changes — whether from HRT, training, or both — your nutrition targets update based on your actual body, not a demographic average.
Protein Targets Should Evolve With Your Transition
A 2021 systematic review by Roberts et al. in the British Journal of Sports Medicine established that protein requirements for muscle protein synthesis range from 1.6 to 2.2 g/kg/day for resistance-trained individuals. But those ranges were established primarily in cisgender populations.
For someone early in testosterone HRT, muscle protein synthesis capacity is increasing but hasn't reached its new baseline. Programming that assumes full androgenic muscle-building capacity from day one is going to overshoot. Programming that ignores the changes entirely is going to undershoot. The right answer is adaptive — it should evolve as your body evolves.
Body by AI's coaching adjusts protein targets, training volume, and progressive overload expectations based on the data it actually has about you — not based on which box you checked at signup.
No Other Fitness App Does This
I've looked. Extensively. Here's what the competitive landscape offers trans and nonbinary users:
- Generic calorie calculators that force a binary male/female selection and use it as the basis for every calculation
- Apps with pronoun fields that collect the data and then ignore it for programming purposes
- "Customizable" apps where "customizable" means you can change the color theme, not the metabolic model
Body by AI was built on 228 peer-reviewed citations. The science doesn't stop being science because someone's physiology doesn't fit a binary model. If anything, it means the science matters more — because the margin for error from generic programming is wider.
What This Looks Like in Practice
When you set up your profile in Body by AI, here's what happens:
- You tell us your sex at birth — because it's relevant to baseline metabolic calculations, and we're honest about why we ask
- You tell us your gender identity — optional, in your own words
- You set your pronouns — and your coach uses them, every time
- You choose your name — the name that feels right, not the name on a form
- Your coaching adapts — BMR, protein, training volume, and progressive overload all respond to your actual body composition data as it changes over time
No gendered benchmarks. No "strong for a woman." No assumptions about what your body should look like or how it should perform based on a checkbox from your signup flow.
Your Coach Sees YOU, Not a Checkbox
I built Body by AI because I spent 25 years getting bad fitness advice from tools that couldn't see me — a 52-year-old with two herniated discs and a decade of bad habits. The tools saw "male, 180 lbs" and gave me the same program they'd give any other male who weighs 180 lbs.
If that experience frustrated me — and it did — imagine what it's like when the tool can't even see your gender correctly. When every interaction starts with a small act of erasure.
Your coach should see you. All of you. The pronouns, yes. But also the physiology, the goals, the history, and the body you're in right now — not the body an algorithm assumes you should have.
That's what we built. And we're not done building it.