When the second annual national honor roll of transgender leaders, the Trans 100, was announced in a celebratory program at the Mayne Stage late last month, mixed martial arts fighter Fallon Fox, who lives and trains in the Chicago suburbs, was both an honoree and a presenter.
On March 2, 2013, in a match that was only her second professional outing, Fox faced an intimidating opponent, Ericka Newsome, in a caged ring in Florida. Fox is a nicely proportioned five-foot-six-inch bantamweight, with dark caramel eyes and a face too pretty to punish. Newsome, shorter but with the same 140-or-so pounds packed into a blockbuster set of muscles, shot Fox a bone-chilling glare in the seconds before the bell. But the fight was over almost as soon as it began. Fox torpedoed a knee into Newsome’s jaw, Newsome went down, and the referee called it a KO. Total fight time: 39 seconds.
And for trans people, Fox says, the consequences include “a chance they’ll lose their friends, their jobs, and even, in some cases, their lives.”
Fox has pointed out in several posts she penned for Time.com that society gives transgender people plenty of reasons for keeping their past to themselves. In her case, that included a Pentecostal-style upbringing in a homophobic, mixed-race family where even television viewing was strictly controlled by her mother and father. After a private Christian elementary school education, she found the public high school in her Toledo, Ohio, neighborhood so violent it made her “scared of my own ethnicity.” A short, skinny kid with a cafe-au-lait complexion, she took beatings over race “from both sides,” and joined the school’s wrestling team to learn how to defend herself.
