In 2021, Alana McLaughlin became just the second openly trans woman to fight in a professional mixed martial arts match.
She won.
McLaughlin has since moved to Pittsburgh. This Saturday, a new documentary about her, “Unfightable,” begins streaming. But despite her growing profile, McLaughlin is still looking for Fight No. 2. And given the controversy around whether trans athletes can compete in women’s sports, she’s not sure when she’ll get it.
“I am always looking for a fight,” McLaughlin told WESA in a recent interview. “There have been very few interested parties, I guess, whether it's the fighters or the promotions. It seems like I get left on ‘read’ a lot.”
“Athletics saved me”
“Unfightable,” directed by Marc J. Pérez, tells McLaughlin’s story starting with her childhood in South Carolina. She was assigned male at birth, but says in the film she knew she was a girl at an early age. She also says she was sexually assaulted by friends of her family and was bullied as well.
“Athletics kind of saved me,” says McLaughlin in the film. She ran track in high school and college. After graduating, she joined the army and served in Afghanistan as a Special Forces sergeant. At around age 30, she began hormone therapy and started transitioning to life as a woman.
Mixed martial arts, she says, felt like a way to get control over her body. While living in Portland, she pursued art and learned blacksmithing — she made knives, swords and other weapons. She also found a community of like-minded friends and became a pro-trans, anti-fascist activist.
Getting an MMA career going proved tougher. In Portland, she was unable to find a gym. Securing a fight was no easier.
Enter Combate Global, a New York-based fight promoter founded by Campbell McLaren, who in the 1990s had co-founded the UFC, the world’s largest MMA promoter. In the early 2010s, featherweight Fallon Fox drew attention when she came out as trans after winning a few MMA bouts. Now Combate was looking for a trans fighter to spark interest in its own show. It booked McLaughlin to face French featherweight Celine Provost in Miami, in September 2021.
An article in The Guardian about McLaughlin as a trans athlete that preceded the fight garnered her death threats.
Pérez, who had done film work for Combate prior to profiling McLaughlin, said he was taken aback by the anger toward her. “What shocked me was just the extreme hate you see online,” he said.
McLaughlin, sporting the nickname Lady Feral, entered the ring that day cloaked in a trans flag and wearing a T-shirt reading “Stop Trans Genocide.” She won in the second round by rear naked choke.
The fight continues
Controversy only grew. States had begun passing laws restricting the ability of trans athletes to compete at the scholastic level in accordance with their gender identity. (More than 20 states now do so.)
As “Unfightable” documents, many in the MMA community supported McLaughlin, notably Combate itself and the coaches at the Miami gym she found after nine others turned her away.
But others vehemently oppose trans athletes competing as women in any sport, claiming that it is unfair and even, especially in combat sports, dangerous to their cisgender opponents. Some have even argued, without real evidence, that some men have transitioned to female primarily for competitive purposes.
In “Unfightable,” Pérez interviews Jake Shields, a former MMA champion and an outspoken right-winger on social media.
“Alana says she’s a woman, has some estrogen, but the truth is, she was born a man, she grew up a man, has all the lungs of a man, the skills of a man, the body of a man,” says Shields. “Maybe she feels like a woman inside, but she’s not.”
Others interviewed include McLaughlin supporters like Anne Lieberman, of advocacy LGBTQ+ group Athlete Ally, and outsports.com journalist Karleigh Webb.
“For the people who are pushing this level of hysteria, it isn’t about sports at all,” Webb says in the film. “It’s about the erasure of transgender people from society as a whole.”
McLaughlin says she’s “mostly happy” with “Unfightable.” She remains upset that Perez interviewed Shields.
“I still hate that guy,” she says. “But after sitting in on some of the screenings and seeing the audience reaction, I guess I can see why that decision was made. You know, sort of putting a human bad guy face in it.”
“We weren't trying to show some like, you know, ‘Feel bad for me. How sad. I can't fight. I can't do that,” said filmmaker Pérez. “She continues to fight. She continues to battle these people that are against, you know, trans [people] in general in sports.
Available evidence
Trans people make up only about 0.5% of the U.S population, and likely an even smaller proportion of competitive athletes, especially at the elite level. Research on the relative performances of trans and cisgender women is scarce.
The argument that trans women have a competitive edge often hinges on the notion that trans women who experienced male puberty retain physiological advantages in speed and strength, as reflected in their typically larger bodies and broader shoulders. A study published in 2020 in the British Journal of Sport Medicine found that trans women ran 9% faster than cisgender women in the study, even after a year of testosterone suppression. And a 2022 study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health concluded: “Many anatomical sex differences driven by testosterone are not reversible.”
But anatomy alone does not equate to performance, and the findings of numerous other studies are less clear-cut. A 2023 review of existing research published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living emphasized the wide variations in athletic performance even within cisgender populations as a reason not to exclude trans athletes.
And a review of scientific literature published in 2024 by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport concluded, among other findings: “Available evidence indicates trans women who have undergone testosterone suppression have no clear biological advantages over cis women in elite sport.”
A study financed by the International Olympic Committee and released this year, meanwhile, found that trans women athletes had greater hand-grip strength than cis women athletes. But by some measures, including cardiovascular fitness and jumping ability, the study found transgender women actually underperformed cisgender women. One of the paper’s co-authors told the New York Times this effect might be the result of the loss of muscle mass that comes with transitioning to female: “Athletes who grow taller and heavier after going through puberty as males must “carry this big skeleton with a smaller engine.” (For example, the 5’7” McLaughlin’s fighting weight against Provost, 145 pounds, was 45 pounds less than her pre-transition weight.)
However, like most of these studies, the IOC-funded report cautioned that more research is needed, especially more sport-specific research.
“Give me the opportunity”
In the three years since McLaughlin’s fight, opportunities for trans athletes have seen some setbacks.
In 2022, Lia Thomas became the first trans woman to win an NCAA swimming championship. Months later, the International Swimming Federation banned trans women who had gone through male puberty from women’s meets. (Thomas, who had competed as a male collegiate swimmer before transitioning, won the women’s 500-meter freestyle event but finished fifth of eight and eighth of eight, respectively, in two other finals.)
And the climate around discussions of the issue has hardly cooled. The controversy even swept up a cisgender athlete at the Paris Olympics: gold-medal winning Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who some falsely alleged was trans.
McLaughlin moved to Pittsburgh just over a year ago. She said several things brought her here.
“The biggest one is that this is where I could afford a house,” said McLaughlin, who settled in East Hills. “But there's also stuff like, you know, ‘Flashdance’ was one of my guilty pleasures as a kid.”
She said it was easier to find a gym here than it had been in Portland. (She’s training at a muy thai gym she declined to name because “there's a lot of creeps out there right now.”)
Getting that second fight, though, remains a challenge. McLaughlin is also battling time: At 41, she’s at the high end of the age range for pro fighters.
“The biggest argument I've had to have is, you know, people will tell me, ‘Well, you're too old now,’” said McLaughlin. “And I'd be like, ‘Give me the opportunity to lose a fight first. You know, don't put me out to pasture until I actually lose.’”
“Unfightable” had a limited-run theatrical release recently in New York and Los Angeles. Saturday, it begins streaming on FuseTV and ViX.
