Finally. A transgender MMA fighter with a sense of fairness

Remember that story we covered about Mack Beggs? She’s the Texas high school wrestler who is “transitioning to be male” and was still forced to wrestle against other girls while taking testosterone. That was a rather oddball story in the diverse spectrum of tales where transgender issues intersect the sports world. You can’t really blame Beggs because she wanted to wrestle against the boys. It was the state who was stopping her.

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Now there’s a different story, though you have to go all the way to Brazil to find it. It deals with the world of MMA fighting, taking place in the octagon steel cages where such things tend to happen. (Or at least so I’ve heard.) One competitor down there is Anne Veriato, a male fighter who is “transitioning” to female and taking female hormones. But unlike some other cases we’ve seen, such as with Fallon Fox, Veriato has no intention of trying to fight women because he recognizes that it would be completely unfair. (Washington Times.)

She’s no Mack Beggs.

Not only is Brazilian MMA fighter Anne Veriato transitioning in the opposite manner (from male to female) but she competes in the opposite manner (against men).

And unlike the Texas high-school wrestler, Veriato said it’d be unfair for her to fight against women, as Beggs is doing…

“It’s only fair to fight men,” Veriato told MMA Fighting. “It never crossed my mind to fight a woman because I think I’m too good. If I beat men my entire career, I can still beat them despite the hormone process.”

We’d have far fewer disputes with the transgender community when it comes to sports if more people simply maintained enough of a grasp on reality to handle their situations this way. Unfortunately, just as with the bathroom access question, people making the choice to alter their bodies in this fashion because of advanced gender dysphoria tend to demand full access to anything and everything associated with the gender they are impersonating. And that leads to immediate problems, particularly in the competitive world of sports.

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Do you recall what happened with Fallon Fox? He was the MMA fighter who insisted on fighting women because he too was “transitioning.” And it nearly cost one woman her life.

Fallon Fox was allowed to enter the arena and fight Tamikka Brents, an actual woman and accomplished fighter. Fox quickly “won a TKO,” in the process fracturing the woman’s skull and sending her to the ER where she had seven staples put in her head. Brents initially objected to the horrific beating she took at the hands of a man but was quickly silenced by the PC police and recanted her objections. As the narrator for Prager University put it, in the old days, if a man beat a woman badly enough to put her in the hospital he’d have gone to jail. Now he can be paid for it.

Veriato is an adult who has made the choice as to what he wants to do with his own body, for better or worse. Being in the field of mixed martial arts, it’s particularly difficult for him to do the right thing here because taking the female hormones is reducing his strength and having other side-effects. But he’s still managing to do it and even won a fight already, so hats off to him. A bit more of a respectful attitude like this in our own country would go a long ways.

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | December 16, 2024
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