Did Fallon Fox Get Her Mma License Back
A Pioneer, Reluctantly
SCHAUMBURG, Ill. — Fallon Fox climbed inside the steel cage, past the sign that read "The Beating Will Continue," and onto a black mat. She followed right jabs with left hooks and kicks flung at imaginary kneecaps, safe, if only for a moment, from the questions and insults and the suffocating fame that descended overnight.
Inside the cage, Fox was free.
Outside, she was caged.
The past month had plunged Fox back into depression, after she became the first openly transgender athlete in mixed martial arts and the most prominent in a professional sport since the tennis player Renée Richards in the 1970s. Fox did not control the timing of the revelation, which came in a Sports Illustrated article, and could not control the backlash that resulted, the harsh words from Hulk Hogan, the hateful comments of the fighter Matt Mitrione, the confusion voiced by the Ultimate Fighting Championship women's champion Ronda Rousey.
In April, Fox watched the basketball players Brittney Griner and Jason Collins tell the world they were gay and receive what seemed like overwhelming public support. Collins's announcement, Fox wrote in an e-mail, left her "proud and happy" and a "tad bit envious." That was more like what she had expected for her experience, and she lingered on the topic of reporters who dug into her fighting licenses and personal background, who asked what has become her story's fundamental question: should someone born a man be allowed to fight women?
At a restaurant in the Chicago suburbs, strangers approached Fox, recognizing her from a recent CNN appearance, and their words, which were supportive, only added to a discomfort that commingles with fear. On one hand, Fox does not want anybody to know where she lives or what her daughter's last name is. And on the other, she has accepted this ambassadorship, even if it means she is less a sports pioneer than a symbol to be analyzed and debated, thrust into a spotlight that singes her psyche.
"I want the public to know how it feels, the fear of being scrutinized, of being outed," Fox said. "The fear of what happens when you come out and the media puts you under a microscope. It's crippling. You get lost."
That was most apparent at a Panda Express restaurant last month near her training center, where Fox, 37, fought back tears as she tried to explain what she did not yet understand. She wanted her life back, but her recent declaration rendered that impossible and resurrected emotions she had for years tried to bury along with her past.
As music played softly in the background, a soothing blend of harps and whistles and violins, Fox pulled her green hat low over her eyes. "I don't even want to talk about it, really," she said. "I don't want to. I never set out to do this. But I have to."
She continued, "I'll stand here, for my community, because I have no other choice."
Her story, no matter how much she wanted to command it, was no longer her own.
Finding Herself and a Purpose
Fallon Fox was born Boyd Burton, the middle of three children, in a conservative, religious, mixed-race household in Ohio. Her father, also Boyd Burton, compiled a long list of arrests and citations from Toledo Municipal Court, including one for failing to restrain a "vicious dog" and another for domestic violence. (Fox declined to discuss this part of her childhood, or her relationship with her family now.)
The family attended church service every Sunday and most Mondays and Wednesdays. Fox said they regularly spoke in tongues. They believed they could heal through prayer and "cure" lesbians and gays. Sometimes, Fox borrowed clothes from her mother's and sister's closets when no one was around.
Art gave Fox an avenue through which to explore the larger world, beyond Ohio, away from church. She spent hours in her room, drawing and painting and studying comic books and anime. Jim Lee was her favorite artist, his work for Marvel Comics crisp and detailed. She appreciated the new worlds he created.
Fox often pictured herself in New York City, in a loft downtown, an easel in the corner, her artist apron on. When she told her parents of her plans, they told her she would find the devil there.
She first heard the word "transgender" when she was 17, on daytime television, and realized that there was a term for what she had been feeling inside. As Boyd Burton, she took a year off after high school, married and had a daughter. She said she married because of the pregnancy. She did not divorce her wife until 2007, according to public records, after she had become Fallon Fox. She served four years in the Navy. She went to technical college and enrolled at the University of Toledo.
All the while, she felt trapped, confined, and she started to research gender dysphoria. She read about other transsexuals who waited years, even decades, to transition, about how it became harder over time. Then her hair started to fall out.
"Looking in the mirror, it was destroying me," Fox said, before pausing to compose herself.
To tell this part of her story was difficult because it is not easily understood and would inevitably be translated into the cookie-cutter version of her life. She took a deep breath and dived back into her tale: to the two years she drove an 18-wheeler across the country, saving money and researching transitions and taking hormones in "this in-between stage"; to the gender reassignment surgery in Thailand in 2006.
Upon her return, the odyssey continued, the search for meaning, for her place in the larger world, more heightened than before. She drove a school bus and worked as a diesel truck mechanic. She lifted weights and studied jujitsu and stumbled across a video on the Internet of Megumi Fujii, a female mixed martial artist. She consumed videos of Fujii and her opponents for days on end.
"It was like, wow, women are fighting," Fox said. "I remembered watching the first U.F.C. You couldn't get it on TV. They were doing it bare knuckles. No gloves. I wanted to do that."
In 2010, Fox landed at Midwest Training Center here, owned by Alex Trujillo and home over the years to hundreds of M.M.A. fighters of every ethnicity and social status. One of Fox's training partners is a 42-year-old pediatrician with a 2-0 record, like Fox's. Others have advanced to the U.F.C., the sport's highest level; Fox fights at a lower level.
The first time Trujillo trained Fox, he believed she could fight professionally. He said "it became very quickly very hard to find opponents who would fight her." She turned pro in 2011, complete with a nickname, the Queen of Swords. Before bouts, she pretended to unsheathe a sword, and in victory, she replaced it.
Her first fight paid less than $700, and expenses, but it provided Fox with far more than monetary gain. The gym became her home, the fighters her replacement family, the cage the place far removed from the relatives who shunned her and the world that did not understand her. At the gym, she could control what happened, and she showed up twice a day almost every day, for years. Her absences were notable, the trainer Dan Finnegan said, because there were so few.
As Fox watched video of her first fight on her cellphone recently, her eyes danced, and she said: "There's the triangle. Then I punch her in the face. Into arm bar. She's already out."
That escape never proved more than temporary. As Fox left the gym each day, her secret resurfaced, always there, always looming, and she agonized over whether "somebody would say something" or "somebody from my past would recognize me." She felt certain she would be forced to reveal her transgender status at some point.
Last August, she met with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, a legal group that has been active in sports issues. Helen Carroll, the director of the center's sports project, walked Fox through potential strategies for coming out. Fox preferred to keep private her medical history, to reveal it to commissions when it came to licensing but not to opponents or the public. That seemed unrealistic, even to her, and yet she held out hope that she could control her announcement, her medical records and her career.
Then a reporter called.
Vitriol and Support
Prompted by that inquiry, Fox took her story to Sports Illustrated. In that instant, her life changed, far more than she initially expected. The article came out. The Web site TMZ published photographs from a former girlfriend of Fox as Boyd Burton. CNN called. Doctors sought medical records. Commissions reviewed applications for her to fight.
Joe Smith, an assistant trainer and gym manager at Midwest Training Center, patrolled mixed martial arts message boards, even as he implored Fox not to. What he found there turned his stomach. He wondered how his own fighters would react to Fox.
Fox showed up, day after day, same as always, but now her story was already all over the Internet, her face on television. She was no longer just a mixed martial artist, no longer simply Fallon Fox. She was the first transgender M.M.A. fighter, and she felt as if she walked around underneath a giant, blinking neon sign announcing that to the world.
The topic was avoided at the gym. No one voiced complaints. Her coaches and trainers said they knew little of her background before the article. They decided that if states would license Fox to fight women, they would train her to do the same. And if there were problems with her licenses, she would be welcome at the gym anyway.
In her role at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Carroll has worked with 30 to 40 transgender athletes. Those who declared themselves publicly could count on vitriol and support. They faced many of the same questions and criticisms that Richards, the tennis player, did decades earlier when she went to court to overturn the United States Tennis Association's attempts to prevent her from playing in women's events at the United States Open.
"It has been harsher for transgender athletes," Carroll said.
"There has been more public education and acceptance around L.G.B.," she said, referring to lesbian, gay and bisexual issues. She added: "Gay marriage has really brought that up front and personal to all people. There's not that base of knowledge in the general public for transsexuals."
Fox's experience embodied that. First, she became the target of hatred and confusion, the worst of it from Mitrione, who called Fox a "lying, sick, sociopathic, disgusting freak." He was briefly suspended by the U.F.C. and was later denounced by the champion fighter Jon Jones. In the interim, Mitrione's words were rebutted by doctors, who wished to raise awareness and clear up misconceptions about transsexuals.
They pointed to policies enacted by the Association of Boxing Commissions, the International Olympic Committee, the N.C.A.A., and other sports leagues and organizations that have allowed transgender athletes to compete under certain guidelines, like gender reassignment surgery and hormone therapy for a minimum amount of time, usually one or two years.
Dr. Eric Vilain, a medical geneticist and the director of the Institute for Society and Genetics at U.C.L.A., helped formulate some of those policies. He reviewed Fox's medical records and said she "clearly fulfilled all conditions." Rousey, the U.F.C. women's champion, ventured that because Fox went through puberty as a male, she retained greater bone density, an assertion dismissed by doctors.
Fox did what seemed like hundreds of interviews. She answered the kind messages she received on Facebook. She cleared up remaining license issues. But all this clarification and education robbed Fox of her gym time and delayed her next fight. For a month, she hardly ventured to the place where she felt safest.
Lost in the scientific viewpoints — and in the not-so-scientific ones — was Fox herself, not the symbol but the human now on international display. She struggled with that. She still struggles with that. The portions of her story she considered footnotes became headlines, the questions less about whether she could fight and more about whether she should.
Kye Allums sympathized. A friend of Fox's, Allums was the first transsexual to play on an N.C.A.A. Division I women's basketball team. When he came out as a transgender man at George Washington University in 2010, Allums conducted interviews for two hours a day for two weeks straight. This strained his relationship with teammates, who remained supportive but grew tired of the continual barrage of questions. He felt irritated for them. A "lose-win," Allums called it.
Gabrielle Ludwig's first month in public view unfolded in a similarly chaotic fashion, after she came out as a transgender basketball player last season at Mission College in California. Two radio hosts derided her as "it." She received death threats, including against her children.
"I had to come to grips that I would no longer be looked at as a basketball player," she said. "I would be looked at first as a transsexual basketball player. You want to keep your anonymity, but it's gone. You have to embrace it. Fallon has to embrace it. You have to say: 'We're not transvestites. We're not cross-dressers. We are in fact women who were once men.' "
A Life in Transition
Back inside the gym, Fox all but collapsed at the end of another practice, after the treadmill and the heavy bag and the harness drills. Her toenails were painted with purple polish. She wore a black tank top that revealed sculptured biceps and wide shoulders, her frame devoid of fat and muscled at 5 feet 6 inches. Her brown hair fell in curls to her shoulders.
Jay-Z's "99 Problems" played over the sound system as Fox interacted with the other fighters, men with triceps the size of cantaloupes and ears that looked like cauliflowers.
Fox, whose license plate frame reads "I'd rather put you in a chokehold," who says casually, "Getting choked out feels a lot better than getting knocked out," caught the eye of one training partner across the room.
"What are you looking at?" Fox said.
She winked.
The reply came, "Not you."
On this day, Fox worked on her transitions, using jabs and crosses to shoot in close and grapple opponents into submission. She dipped under her trainer Trujillo's punches, shot elbows toward his chin, small transitions amid larger ones.
Here, the cage was real, and the pain was inflicted on someone other than herself. She understood the world here, where there are rules, winners and losers, where hard work nets results, where the only question is whether she can fight.
Fox is competing in the Championship Fighting Alliance featherweight tournament. Her semifinal is scheduled for May 24 in Coral Gables, Fla. Trujillo said he believed Fox would win the tournament and its $20,000 prize, and he said he could envision a time when Fox would be ranked among the top female mixed martial artists in the world, age willing. If only that were her only fight, a matchup with Father Time, not with bigots and those on the Internet who make death threats and cruel jokes at her expense.
After practice, Fox climbed into her car as she left the gym, her hat back on, her eyes sullen, perhaps the product of the public glare. She drove home, where one side of her house was boarded up from a recent fire, where two swords rested atop a shelf that held the books from the "Twilight" series and the Bible.
She said she loved to fight because she could do so at an elite level, because she could define herself by accomplishments instead of by sexual identity, because she loved to train, because "it does make me feel safe." She was later asked if she feared for her safety or that of her daughter, and she snapped back not to ask her that again.
She paused for 30, 40, 50 seconds. Tears came to her eyes.
She continued: "The danger is you never know if people are actually saying what they mean. I've learned you never know how someone will react. I've lost relationships over it."
In an e-mail late last month, Fox said she was "feeling better lately" and "feeling positive" and had been temporarily depressed. Thus continued her latest transition, from a fighter with a secret to a symbol without privacy, from someone who sought control to someone who lost it when she told her story to the world. There is no turning back now, no way to change the narrative.
Only, she hopes, acceptance. For her, certainly. And from her, too.
Did Fallon Fox Get Her Mma License Back
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/sports/for-transgender-fighter-fallon-fox-there-is-solace-in-the-cage.html
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