Alana McLaughlin: ‘I want to pick up the mantle that Fallon put down’ Seven years after #FallonFox left the ring, McLaughlin readies for her MMA debut and talked about how Fox inspires her efforts, on The Trans Sporter Room Among the mixed martial arts hopefuls preparing themselves at #MMA Masters in Coral Gables, Fla., a finishing school of sorts for the sport, toils a 38-year-old fighter-in-waiting named Alana McLaughlin. She’s spent months preparing for a debut to come next week. McLaughlin is slated to meet France’s Celine Provost, also a pro MMA debutante, on Combate Global’s fight card on Aug. 6 that will be live streamed by Paramount Plus. The fight will also make history. Mclaughlin will be the first publicly out #transgender competitor in a professional MMA match since Fallon Fox’s final fight, a win in September 2014. In an interview on this week’s edition of The Trans Sporter Room podcast, she noted what that fight means to herself and to a community that has seen sports weaponized against it via a national, coordinated legislative and media campaign. “If we want to see more trans athletes, if we want to see more opportunities for trans kids, we’re going to have to work out way into those spaces and make it happen,” she said. “It’s time for trans folks to be in sports and be more normalized.” From a personal standpoint she noted that now was the time to take this chance. “I’m 38, so if I’m going to do anything serious competitive athletically, like now is the time. Every fighter’s got an expiration date, and I want to do it while I still can.” Some of the urgency comes from growing up young and queer in South Carolina, “right in the buckle of the Bible Belt” as she described it. Struggling with her gender identity within an unaccepting family and largely anti-LGBTQ surrounding, she was bullied and harassed to a breaking point. “It was all shame back then. I was told by my parents that I made myelf a target and I had to ‘act less feminine’,” she ruefully recalled. “There were periods of my life where I swung on this steady pendulum from hyper-masculine to hyper-feminine and back again.” High school is where things came to a head, with a twist. https://www.instagram.com/p/CSAw7coHF1d/?utm_medium=tumblr
