Ever had hate mail? I have. I’ll get to the details of that in a second, but here’s why my adventures as Cari Cox came back to my mind:
This week, Dr. Rachel McKinnon, a Canadian woman, won the UCI Masters Track Cycling World Championship in Los Angeles. She’s pretty stoked, as any athlete who wins in their sport should be. She even set a world record in the quarter finals. The thing is, she was born a man.
Rachel McKinnon is the latest transgender athlete to make headlines as a winner.
While some are showering the transgender athlete with praise, others are calling her a cheater. For the record, the rules allow her to be there.
Here’s the thing: if she came in last, or even fourth, no one would give two squirts of piss. But Dr. Rachel McKinnon won. Big Time. Shattered a record. This obviously opens up a complicated debate. Honestly, it’s not even one that I want to weigh in on, because cycling, as much as I love it as a mode of TRANSportation, barely counts as a sport to me. See what I did there?
Now, back to my hate mail.
In 2013 I was driving through the Rocky Mountains headed to Vancouver in a van full of my friends. I was creating videos for the Mexican Hockey League, at the time and I was always on the lookout for inspiration. We were listening to XM Radio, and they started talking about Fallon Fox – a transgender male to female who had been fighting as a professional MMA fighter. I can’t even remember if it was more than a brief story, but I pulled out my phone to check out some of her hilights. Here’s what I saw:
Fallon appeared to be way faster and stronger than her opponent and obviously knocked her senseless. I looked up a couple of her other fights and it was more of the same.
Right or wrong, instantly what came to my mind was “that looks like a dude in there smashing those chicks.” Bingo. We had a concept for a video. Once I was home, my writing partner and I hammered out the concept.
Our character, coincidentally named Cari Cox, was a misogynist woman beater who’d discovered a legal loophole. All old Cari had to do was PRETEND that he was a pre-op transgender, and people would PAY HIM to beat up women. And cheer while he did it!
It’s fucked up, I know, but that’s how my sense of humour is. Feel free not to read any further if you’re already offended.
The Ultimate Fighter was big at the time and they were starting to have seasons that included women. The perfect angle would be to create a fake application video, call out some famous womanly warriors and the rest would be history. Here it is:
I’m assuming that because I had a history in MMA, shortly after posting it, the video made it’s way to Ronda Rousey, the women’s UFC champ at the time. She thought it was hilarious and posted it to her Facebook and Twitter. So began the shitstorm.
For the most part, people thought it was funny; however, the transgender community… didn’t.
We got a number of angry messages from members and supporters of the transgender community. We even got a mention on a transgender blog. Check it out:
There are two options there, but I’m going to say that it was both.
The point that most of the people made is that the IOC allows transgender athletes to compete in Olympic Sports. This, to me, is an absurd argument. There is not one sport in the olympics that comes close to the level of violence that’s inflected in MMA. In MMA, safety for the athletes is far different, even from Olympic boxing.
Unfortunately, the anti-transgender community (also known as bigots) took the video as an opportunity to sling mud as well. The term “freak” was used pretty regularly. I’m really not down with picking on anyone, no matter how different they seem, unless they’ve been an asshole in some way. The whole thing got uncomfortable, and we debated pulling the video down. Some sites did it for use. The problem was that we still found it funny, weather it was misunderstood or not.
As it turns out, The MHL and Rowdy Ronda weren’t the only ones who found it amusing. Gabriel Morensy, a sports broadcaster also posted a clip of the video. He then asked me/Cari Cox in for an interview. “Why the hell not do an interview posing as a guy posing as a transgender,” I thought? I dug out my hottest cocktail dress and headed down to the bright lights of The Fight Network.
My sense of humour out there. They actually even cut part of the interview because I started rambling about throwing women down stairs or something. I’m a man clown with what could easily be argued as a distasteful sense of humour. To me, not much is sacred.
My stance on the whole transgenders in sport thing is this: I have no problem with transgenders or the transgender community. I’d imagine that being transgender is pretty difficult and I don’t think they should be excluded in society; however, professional fight sports is far from regular society or even regular sports, like cycling. Fallon Fox was dishonest about being transgender, then stepped into the ring and fucked some shit up. That’s wrong. If, from the moment she was honest about her history women still wanted to fight her, then I say it’s all good.
As it turned out, Fallon got beaten later that year, and slipped out of the headlines after that. As far as I can tell, she hasn’t fought since 2014, perhaps because the cat was out of the bag. Like I said, if the transgender athlete is winnng, it’s a problem. If not, no one cares. Can you recall a story about a female to male transgender making controversial headlines after dominating the competition? I sure can’t. And that’s probably because males have a pretty major physiological and social advantage in most sports.
Anyway, congrats to Rachel McKinnon. Whether her former gender gives her and advantage or not, she beat the tar out of those other chicks, and that’s what counts the most when you’re trying to win.
Relax. Of course I’m kidding.
