<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"As she hears her name, the world's first and only transgender professional MMA fighter steps up to the stage and the crowd goes\u2026silent.\n\nIt's a humid October night in Miami, and Fallon Fox is standing on a makeshift riser at the Newport Beachside Hotel Resort, looking out over a gathering of about a hundred MMA fans who have shown up at the poolside bar to hoist mojitos and watch the pre-fight weigh-in, which started two hours late. So by the time Fallon whips her T-shirt over her head and pulls off her jeans in a single swift movement, revealing a black string bikini with a big affliction logo on the ass, everybody's pretty lit.\n\nAt five feet six and 37 years old, Fox is two inches shorter and eleven years older than her opponent for tomorrow night's championship featherweight bout, Ashlee Evans-Smith, a former top college wrestler, one of the few women who will agree to fight her. Compact, with big shoulders, round breasts, and narrow hips, Fox is impressively fit but not cut. You can't get a washboard when you pop sixteen milligrams of estrogen every morning. Your belly's always going to have that sweet\n\ngirl-curve to it, even after months of dieting and training five hours a day, six days a week, for the biggest fight\u2014by far\u2014of your career.\n\nThe scale reads 144.8\u2014two-tenths of a pound below the cap\u2014but there's none of the applause there was a few moments ago for Evans-Smith. The only sound besides some distorted Drake on the cheap sound system is the scraping of a metal folding chair on the cement.\n\nFox fles for two seconds and flashes the requisite smile for the TV cameras, her teeth brilliant against her mocha-latte skin, her hair an amber curtain. Maybe when she wins tomorrow, this shot will supplant the Internet trolls' favorite, the one where they caught her from an angle that made her jaw look manly. Maybe it's all starting to change, finally, and she can be just another female fighter grounding and pounding in the cage.\n\nOr maybe not.\n\nKick her in the nuts! yells a guy waving a Dos Equis, breaking the silence as his girlfriend shushes him in mock horror. That's all it takes: The cracks start to fly, fast and nasty. I bet she's got it folded up somewhere in there! someone shouts from across the pool.\n\nBut Fox is gone already, through a side door and into an empty meeting room adjoining the bustling lobby. After starving herself for two days to make weight, she wants out of here and into a bowl of pasta, away from reporters and the crap hip-hop, away from the guys with their phones held high, hoping to snap a pic to text to their pals.\n\nOne last step, as the boxing-commission doctor hands her a small plastic cup: the pregnancy test, required of female fighters. In the right light, you can see it as progress.\n\nI bet I pass, she deadpans softly, raising an arched eyebrow as she heads toward the ladies' room, slicing through the scrum of tourists like a paring knife. For a moment at least, she's just another cute girl in flip-flops by the beach.\n\n\n\nArguably there's no safe place in the world for a woman who was born a male, but some places are safer than others. You can head for an anything-goes enclave like San Francisco or either of the Portlands, or maybe a Vermont hamlet where people keep to themselves.\n\nBut here is one destination you probably want to avoid: an octagonal metal cage with a sweat-slick canvas and 3,000 testosterone-jacked ticket holders yelling for your blood. Having spent pretty much your entire adult life longing to embody femininity in its purest form, you might not want to plunge into a world even more macho than football, a seething pit of male energy, all brutal precision, sharp kicks, and elbows to the jaw. A subculture not exactly known for its progressive gender politics.\n\nPeople think it's weird, I know, that I want to do this, spend so much of my time with these kinds of guys, but one-on-one they're mostly okay, Fox says over dinner at an Italian restaurant a mile down the road from the Newport Beachside. Because she'd dropped twelve pounds in two weeks\u2014tougher when you have eight or ten pounds of silicone implants in your chest\u2014it now takes a few minutes for the carbs to reactivate her brain. She's always been a quiet type, anyway, and tonight, with the fight only twenty-four hours away, it's even harder than usual for her to talk about herself. She's trying to stay calm instead of obsessing, not just about the $20,000 prize money she desperately needs but about how the world may judge her by what happens tomorrow night. She tells herself she's here because this is where she belongs, that the cage is where her gift is, that it chose her as much as she chose it.\n\nMMA is the most dangerous sport there is for a transgender, with all the body contact, I know that, she says. But it just turned out that I was good at it, you know? You pursue what you're good at.... I realize that it's kind of amazing that I hit girls. You're brought up not to hit girls, that it's the worst sin, and that's what I do. But you know, gender is the last thing I think about when I'm fighting. It's the one situation where I don't think of gender at all.\n\nIt's facile to compare her to Jason Collins of the NBA and soccer star Robbie Rogers, both of whom came out in 2013 as gay. There really is no parallel. Gay athletes? The response at this point has been mild and civilized in most quarters, at least on the record. So brave of you! It's about time!\n\nBut when you are a transgender athlete, a lesbian transgender athlete, a lesbian transgender athlete who fights women in a cage, a lesbian transgender athlete who fights women in a cage and fathered a daughter, a lesbian transgender athlete who fights women in a cage and fathered a daughter and served as a man in the Navy, you are not just scaling the barricades but throwing yourself against them full force. I just try not to think about all of the obstacles all at once, she says. I tell myself, you know how to win. Sometimes you get beat up, but you've always won.\n\n\n\nShe wasn't always sure she wasn't a boy. There was no time to think about that back in East Toledo, Ohio, in a house where fearing the Lord was a full-time job. Born Boyd Burton, he and an elder sister and a younger brother were herded to church four times a week to witness folks rolling on the ground and speaking in tongues. They were charged with memorizing Scripture and expected to pray aloud to keep the Devil at bay. Shy and artsy, Boyd had flashes of a female self but poured the confusion into a sketchbook, stealing away to doodle cartoons inspired by Marvel Comics and Japanese anime; his mother tried to think of ways he could draw in the service of the Lord, whatever that meant.\n\nHe experimented with girls' clothing as early as 5 or 6, and by middle school he knew there was something really wrong. He felt slow and numb to the world, as though he were walking through soup all the time or covered in bubble wrap. Sometimes he'd cook up an excuse to avoid going to church with the rest of the family and find himself alone in his mother's closet. She had a nurse's aide's uniform from the '70s, before she quit to keep house. I stood in front of the mirror, and I knew it was right. It was the only thing that had ever been right, Fox says now. But it also meant I was damned. I mean, that seemed totally logical to me. You feel that way and you think you've got the Devil in you, just like they say.\n\nGirls were drawn to his quiet cool, his subversive humor. He rocked leather and Nine Inch Nails and even wrestled for a year in high school. When he was 19, he got a girl pregnant. He married her\u2014no choice\u2014then joined the Navy for a four-year hitch. The relationship didn't last, but he sent money home for his daughter. He lived in an apartment off the base, spending a lot of time alone there, dressed in a black sundress with red and yellow flowers, playing video games. When he looked in the mirror, though, there was still just a guy in a dress.\n\nAfter he got out of the Navy, he went back home to study graphic design at the University of Toledo under the GI Bill, delivering pizzas at night. But by then his hair had started falling out, the final indignity. Every glance in the mirror was agony, his reflection getting older, a bald man looking back. He couldn't bear the thought of becoming one of those sad 50-year-olds finally getting up the courage to transition, having spent their good years trapped in five o'clock shadow and regret.\n\nHe told his parents he wanted to become a woman; they sent him to a Christian reparative-counseling group, because they figured he was a gay man who needed to be cured. The guy running the group had a business card with a cross for the t in therapy. He told him to step up the prayer, burn the sundress, and reconnect to the straight man within by diving deep into baseball, football, and Die Hard movies.\n\nSix years. That's what it took to fully accept who he was and what he had to do, most of it spent behind the wheel of a big rig, of all places. That job meant dropping out of college, but driving an eighteen-wheeler let him be alone with his thoughts, away from Toledo, away from church. He started taking hormones, still nagged by the fear that the Devil was behind it all. A slight figure with plucked brows and a bandanna around his head, he'd wave vaguely to the other drivers as he ducked into truck-stop bathrooms to shoot estrogen, his budding breasts bound by Ace bandages.\n\nHe became Fallon one winter day between Tulsa and Topeka. For nearly a year he'd been listening to NPR\u2014apostasy at home\u2014and books on tape, such as Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great. Suddenly it seized him, as forcefully as the Rapture was supposed to: There was no one up there. No vengeful Redeemer looking to smite you for being a woman, no demons dancing on your grave. Suddenly she was free. Where I came from, it was more shocking to be an atheist than to be transgender, she says now, blanching still, putting her hand over the tape recorder. It's the worst thing you can be.\n\nNo one came with her to Thailand for the operation, top and bottom surgery, plus hair implants\u2014cheaper there\u2014in 2006, when she was 30. It was too expensive to bring a friend to Bangkok, and after all those years hiding on the road, she didn't really have any. You're scared, but you just go on automatic when you get on the plane, she recalls. You're just thinking that for the first time in your life, you might be able to be who you are.\n\n\n\nReally, she shouldn't have been surprised by the phone call that Saturday night last March\u2014she knew a secret that big couldn't stay secret forever\u2014but still, it laid her flat. Just hours before, in only her second pro bout, she'd KO'd Ericka Newsome with a knee to the jaw in under a minute. It was her first fight for the Miami-based Championship Fighting Alliance, and she and Joe Smith, her trainer, were out at a Chinese restaurant celebrating. Joe, who'd known her since 2010, when she first came to the Midwest Training Center, a hard-core MMA gym outside Chicago, had only found out she wasn't born female a couple of months earlier. (He had advised her to silence a growing chorus of rumors about her past by taking a genetic test to prove she was a woman; she shocked him by admitting she'd never pass.) She'd hoped for a graceful coming out, of course, even quietly talked with some LGBT activists about the right way to do it. But then, before she could figure out how to gently tell the world, the grenade exploded: an MMA blogger on the other end of the line, just as the chicken chow fun hit the table. I'm hearing whispers about you and your medical history-can we talk?\n\nJoe called Fox's manager, who short-circuited the blogger by giving the scoop to SI.com. The Florida State Boxing Commission responded by putting her license under review, railroading her next fight (and potentially her career). Then a UCLA geneticist who has worked with the International Olympic Committee on similar gender issues came to her defense, reviewing her records and declaring that Fox had more than fulfilled the standard requirements for trans athletes by having had surgery and getting hormones for at least two years afterward. Bone density, admittedly higher in the average man, was irrelevant to athletic performance, he said. Due to the surgery\u2014no more gonads\u2014and her drug regimen, the levels of male hormones in her blood were virtually nonexistent. Paradoxically, in fact, some of her female opponents would have more male chemical mojo pumping through their veins. To answer the claims that she had misled the boxing commission, Fox produced a ream of paperwork.\n\nBut the damage was done. A few days later, TMZ published a photo of Boyd Burton they'd gotten from an old girlfriend, a three-quarter-profile shot of a studly guy in a leather jacket. Matt Mitrione, the NFL defensive tackle turned MMA star, publicly called her a lying, sick, sociopathic, disgusting freak. Ronda Rousey, the Olympic bronze medalist in judo who is the top-ranked women's fighter, also weighed in, telling the New York Post that Fox could try hormones, chop her pecker off, but it's still the same bone structure a man has. The comments on fight blogs, where MMA lives almost as vibrantly as it does in the cage, ran 100 to 1 against her. Bad odds even for someone used to them.\n\nAt the time, Fox told Time magazine that the response didn't surprise her\u2014It's part of our history as human beings. People that we don't understand, we always try to make fun of, sensationalize\u2014but in fact she was rocked by the depth of the cruelty. Sure, liberal media might be in her corner (The New York Times called her a pioneer), and that was nice but ultimately didn't mean much. They were not her kind, they would never be. Her people would always be the people of the cage, the kind she grew up with, and they were overwhelmingly opposed. Still, she couldn't give up. MMA could be the way out of a hand-to-mouth existence for her and her daughter, whom she'd raised when the court awarded her full custody after, Fox says, the girl's mother developed a drug problem. Besides, she says, I just wasn't going to run away.\n\nShe kept self-pity at bay by reminding herself that she'd had years of living as a woman in anonymity, a luxury few transgender people get. After the surgery, before she found MMA, she'd been just your average single mom, trying to stay afloat as a school-bus driver and a clerk at Blockbuster, in a rented apartment in the working-class suburbs west of Chicago. Experimenting with degrees of girliness, she'd tried French manicures, heels, skirts short enough to showcase her sculpted calves and delicate ankles. She wasn't entirely sure of her sexuality back then, though like lots of male-to-female transgenders, she suspected she preferred women (the rule of thumb being that you tend to continue to be attracted to whichever gender you preferred before the transition). Still, she gave men a try, in keeping with the super-femme persona. They were fine, and it was flattering to have the attention, but they didn't light her on fire like the girls did.\n\nIn the meantime, she got a bit of facial feminization work: the slightest softening of the jaw, a millimeter or two off the nose and brow. Silly how the media make such a big to-do about bottom surgery, she thought, when most trans people put more store in what they look like with their clothes on. Passing becomes everything, everything, she says. Every time you go into a Starbucks and there's nothing in someone's eyes, it feels great.\n\nAnd then came the bubble of the gym. Fox had always been fit, even competed in Brazilian jujitsu, one of the MMA skills, during the first couple of years after her surgery. But in 2009 she stumbled onto some YouTube videos of Japanese female MMA fighters like Megumi Fujii, and she knew she'd found the world she belonged in\u2014just the right alchemy of martial-arts Zen and pure aggression. Despite her flirtation with ultra-femme style, she was, she realized, a motorcycle chick, more rock 'n' roll than flowered sundress. Plus, the intensity of MMA would help keep her weight down and her muscle tone up\u2014more difficult since her transition\u2014and it might save her life someday if she had to take down some asshole in the street. The female fighters were tough but really womanly, she says. Dark and powerful. That was my version of femme.\n\nThe guys at Joe's gym, plenty of tats and attitude, had been wary at first, not believing that a girl could want to do this, really do it. Most who'd come in before had eventually drifted off. But once they saw Fallon's focus, they treated her like everyone else\u2014on the mat, at the heavy bag, and in the cage jammed up against the walls. Women's MMA was really just getting started back then, and the guys impressed her by keeping track of the emerging female stars, like Cris Cyborg and Marloes Coenen. Being a woman, Fox didn't have real strength, but her skills developed astonishingly fast, especially grappling, widely considered the most important skill in the sport; it wasn't long before Joe and fellow trainer Alex Trujillo were talking about how she should go pro, like a handful of the gym's best fighters had. There was plenty of disappointment when she brought her girlfriend in, though it wasn't that much of a surprise; lots of women on the circuit were gay, though Liz Carmouche was the only well-known one who talked about it. A real shame in Fallon's case, they agreed, though it did defuse any sexual tension when you were in the cage with her.\n\nAnd you had to hand it to Fallon, she trained like a motherfucker, in there four times a week, down there grounding and pounding with the best of them, knowing how to take it when they razzed her and giving it back just as good, then heading to the tiny women's locker room to shower and blow out her hair, waving to them with a coy smile as she shoved on a baseball cap and headed for the parking lot.\n\n\n\nThis is going to be your fight, says Joe as he begins taping her hands, a rep from the Florida boxing commission looking on, as usual, to make sure it's all clean. It's the night after the weigh-in, fight night, and the TV guys are shooting some promo tape to flash on the JumboTron before she and Ashlee get into the cage. I'm a better fighter, pure and simple, Fox says, staring down the lens.\n\nThe last time she fought, in the semifinals of the CFA featherweight championship in May, it was different, darker, scarier. It was her first pro bout as an out transgender, and the sniping about her licensing lingered. It seemed as though every camera in the country was pointed at her. A few weeks before, she and her girlfriend had broken up; the girlfriend couldn't take the media incursion or Fox's emotional distance. It was incredibly lonely, and I couldn't trust anyone, Fox says. I was sure everyone would sell me out for a price.\n\nShe won, but it was a frustrating victory. Her opponent, Allanna Jones, was primarily a bor, and she spent most of the three rounds dancing away instead of going to the mat, where Fox liked to be. Fox eventually subdued her with a knee to the throat, but it took three rounds and wasn't the rout she wanted. Joe tried to tell her it was actually better that way, that now people could see that she was just like every other female fighter trying to make it to the big time, that she wasn't a guy in drag effortlessly destroying a natural-born woman. But it was a double-edged sword in Fox's mind: She wasn't in this to make a political point. She wanted a career. She'd have to show she was truly skilled if she wanted to move up in the rankings, get the attention of Invicta (the women's league) or the UFC.\n\nWorst of all, Jones had chosen as her entrance music Aerosmith's Dude (Looks Like a Lady). It roused the already hostile crowd to mob level and wound up an Internet meme.\n\nYou try to block it all out when you're walking to the cage, but you can't help thinking, What's the point of being so cruel? Fox says. What is that doing for you? Where does that come from?\n\nTonight, she's a world away from all that, feeling strong. There had been five long months between fights, and she'd been telling herself that the delay would give the Internet vitriol time to run its course. Even Mitrione had apologized\u2014sort of. (See A Cage Divided on page 48.)\n\nAnd she had fallen in love, begun a relationship with Amy Pierson, a slender, smart-alecky 28-year-old with long dark hair parted down the middle, an administrative job at a health care company, and a prosperous family. Amy helped Fox get into therapy, opening doors in her head she thought had been soldered shut.\n\nFallon's hugely favored against Evans-Smith\u2014425 to 1\u2014but the calculus is murky: Is it that Las Vegas is just assuming she can take any woman who'll get in the cage with her, or that Evans-Smith has less experience, isn't as good a fighter?\n\nJoe tells her not to drive herself nuts trying to parse it all. After training her for a couple of years, he knows just how to chill her out, keep her in the moment. He sure never figured he'd be here, with her. =Stocky, with patchy hair, meaty inked biceps, and a scrap of beard, he used to be a regular by-the-book Republican, the caveman kind. Not so much since he's been working with her.\n\nI'm not saying I would be that cool with this, with who she is, if I hadn't met her before, he says. But she walked into the gym, and I got to know her. It makes you start to think about politics, about all the other things you assumed, and you go, wow, maybe I've been an asshole this whole time about a lot of it. He's proud of the way the guys at the gym took it when the news broke, only one or two avoiding her, and even they did it politely, the rest just settling back into business as usual. He's not that sure what would have happened if they hadn't already known her, if someone like that, loud and proud and looking to train, walked in the door. They're not really that enlightened, he says.\n\nHe's talking low to her now, like to a Thoroughbred at the starting gate, as she pulls on an oversize gray hoodie. With no makeup, her hair twisted close to her head, the hood drawn up, she's a compact, gender-free fighting machine, sparring as her iPhone blasts Enter the Ninja by the South African rap-rave group Die Antwoord (I am your butterfly, I need your protection, be my samurai). In the dressing room next door, Evans-Smith is watching the undercard on a monitor, punching a fist into her open hand, over and over.\n\nIt's 9:30 P.M. when the commission official sticks his head into Fox's room: You're up, honey.\n\nShe and Joe walk down the hall to the curtained opening of the arena. It's fifty yards, past the bleachers of fans on their feet, up to the elevated cage hung heavy with a JumboTron and a snake's nest of TV cameras and wires. Evans-Smith is already inside the chain-link walls.\n\nWe're gonna treat this girl like shit, Joe hisses into Fox's ear.\n\nThe boos and screams\u2014Beat 'er up, Ashlee, fuck 'er up!\u2014grow deafening on the walk to the cage. People are stamping their feet so hard you can feel the vibrations up the backs of your legs. She wasn't expecting it to be like this\u2014even louder than it was before the bout against Jones. The crowd is half women, but they're just as loud, their faces twisted. One girl looks like she might jump the railing as Fox passes, to wrap her hands around Fox's neck. A guttural chant rises as the door closes behind Fox\u2014Ash-lee! Ash-lee!\u2014and spreads through the cavernous space like thunder.\n\nAbout ten seconds into the fight, Fox misjudges her timing on an attempted choke hold and Evans-Smith capitalizes on the error, aggressively counterattacking with punches, kicks, and elbows. Fox, clearly shocked, beats her back with knees and punches of her own. But within moments of the second-round bell, it's clear Fox is flagging, her arms no longer held high enough, her strength waning, despite Joe's urging her on from his red stool. The fighters go to the mat, slippery with blood and sweat from the bout before, and Evans-Smith easily grips her between her big legs, beats Fallon in the face repeatedly. By the third and final round, the crowd is hoarse with joy as the fighters go immediately to the canvas. Evans-Smith mounts her, and unleashes a nonstop flurry of punches. The ref steps in to stop the relentless pounding. TKO. Fourteen minutes. Joe bursts through the cage door as the officials help the dazed Fox up. He's angry, but you can't tell at whom.\n\nI don't know what happened, she says over the phone from her hotel room at 1 A.M. Her right knee is as big as a softball, and her face is swollen in half a dozen places. After the fight, she was led into Evans-Smith's dressing room so they could smile and shake hands for the camera, the giant replica of the $20,000 check leaning against the wall, but that's all a blur. Evans-Smith, weeping with emotion and relief, had told Fox she was a fucking warrior, how honored she was to have fought her. She seems sincere. But the light had already gone out of Fox's eyes by then, and after getting checked out by the fight doctor, she let Joe drop her off at her shitty hotel.\n\nFor some reason, I just can't make it past the first round, she says, her voice exhausted, deflated, incredulous. I run out of gas. I have to figure this out. She is trying not to think of all she's lost, of the prize money she needed, badly, or that this will make it easier for Invicta and the UFC to simply ignore her, burying not merely her career but the entire question of whether transgender fighters deserve a place in the cage. She swears she won't let the defeat stop her, that she'll be back to the gym within a week or so. We don't talk about the obvious\u2014that at her age, the sands are running through the hourglass.\n\nI suggest that the problem may be her glaring lack of testosterone, that giving that up to feel more fully female may be the cruelest irony of all\u2014she may never have what she wants, at least not all of it. She has had this thought before, but in the shadow of the beating it hits especially hard, and she goes silent. She's always believed she could beat biology, and thus far she has. It's tough to accept she may have hit a wall, one she can't move, no matter how hard she hurls herself against it.\n\nThere's an upside to all this, as we both know, a strange fact that brings a part of her dream to life as never before\u2014while simultaneously crushing another. I wait for her to bring it up, and she does, her voice catching in the back of her throat. I guess this means that people will realize that I'm just a woman after all. I'm female. I'm human. Sometimes I dominate and sometimes I'm dominated.\n\nOne more irony hovers on the line between us, as if her story needs another: It may now, at last, be easier to find women who will fight her. If she'd won this title, especially in the spectacular way she'd imagined, she may have never found another matchup. Such a thought has clouded every one of her wins. I'd seen it in Joe's eyes whenever I asked about the future.\n\nI guess they'll come out of the woodwork now, she says, her voice soft and rueful. They were afraid before, but now they'll all want to beat a woman who used to be a man.\n\nIt may take her months to prepare, endless hours in the gym, many more in her head, but if she gets the call, she'll fight. She always has.\n\nnancy hass's last story for  GQ, about Netflix founder Reed Hastings, appeared in the February 2013 issue."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/fallon-fox-transgender-mma-fighter>