I describe myself as a trans femme person, but if we want to get into the nitty gritty, I would first say I'm Black and then I'm queer. From the queerness you then go into Black femininity, but not necessarily and exclusively femininity. I fluctuate around the non-binary space, but I'm more partial to femininity – but not always.

Wrestling came along back when I was in high school, when one of my friends who was a wrestler brought me along for a show. I got on the card and I've been wrestling more or less ever since.

Wrestling has helped my queerness by making me more comfortable with the physical form, and more comfortable with being open with my gender. As a pro-wrestler, you have to be able to own who you are, to accept that some people aren't going to like you, to deal with that, and then improve from it. Following Judith Butler’s idea of performativity and gender, grappling with the idea of performance has gotten a lot easier – that feeling of being on stage to play a role.

But as a wrestler, I don't just have to play the role. I can yell back, I can confirm, I can deny, I can express myself more vocally – not just in painting my nails or wearing my hair long, but also in explicitly stating myself.

Navigating gender in America was very interesting. I was much more masculine over there, much more "boy". But since I've been in Korea for the past few years, I've been pretty openly trans – something just wasn’t clicking with the masculine terms that were used for me. My wrestling nickname here is the ‘Queer Queen of Korean Wrestling’.

So it's a very expressive statement, a very clear declaration of not just who I am as far as my name, but also who I am as a person.

Wrestling created a gateway for drag, and I would say my wrestling and drag now borrow from each other. At first, they were inseparable because I was using the same name, but they’ve been manifesting in different ways now. My wrestling persona is much more joyful and loudmouth, while my drag is more on the ‘gutter girl’ side of things.

I feel most sexy when I'm in drag – it’s a big gender euphoric moment to have my makeup looking right and to get my hair done. I don't care for nails too much because they actually make me pretty dysphoric.

Playing a more macho version of myself while wrestling can dip into a dysphoric situation

With gender dysphoria, I hit these contrasts because my arms are more defined, but sometimes I wish to have been more svelte and more slender with a softer kind of skin sensation. It’s tough because I'm always working out, always moving, putting on muscle and such. There's also the sense that ‘perception is reality’. As somebody who is perceived as a cis Black male, there’s a voice in my head that says that I should perform to a machismo expectation.

But for my own sake, I typically just fluctuate with how I'm feeling in the day and as I typically feel more feminine, I try to go along those lines.

My wrestling gear used to be pretty manly – shorts, pants, and so on. Now I'm wearing skirts/skorts that have shorts underneath them, which has been a nice little journey in getting my gender expression all the way through.

I've been wanting to experiment with hormones for years and years now, but the process of going through it is a headache and a half because where I'm living in Korea, you can't easily have access to hormones and things of that nature.

In wrestling, I’m playing a more macho version of myself than I am. So there are times that dips into more of a dysphoric situation. But I have gotten more comfortable with that. There's also the added benefit of just being able to yell at people for misgendering me, which in a weird way for me is pretty euphoric: somebody will say, "Oh, he's really beating you up," and I shout back, "She's beating them up" as I beat somebody up. It's fun.

My gender exploration came more from my personal life than from wrestling, because there's a wild current of homophobia in wrestling despite it being an extremely gay activity. In recent years, I've seen more and more queer wrestlers, from Sonny Kiss in Australia to Lucas Fantasia and Singapore. I recently wrestled Erfie, who’s an openly bisexual wrestler. 

Navigating these spaces as one of the only trans wrestler is a little hard because most of the time, I'm competing against cis men, so there's not really a "conflict" point. There isn’t a ‘clash’ because I'm never really booked against women. 

My gear is the Trans Pride flag and the non-binary pride flag and I'm very expressive and very emotive about those things. The reception has generally been pretty good and fans are getting used to just calling me the Queer Queen, which is gonna be unfortunate when I have to change to a different hashtag.

Being stereotyped for race as a Black trans wrestler in Korea

I'm the longest working Black person in Korean wrestling – they may have had one or two in the past, but I've been in the scene a very long time. That was very fraught, not just with the queer part, but with the Black part.

To this day, almost every time that I cut my wrestling promos, fans will say I'm rapping despite their being Korean subtitles. I don’t rap and that’s been like a very explicit part of my character. Not because I don't like rap music. I love rap music. I just don't want them to be so quick to put me into this box but unfortunately, that's what a lot of people keep pushing towards.

But there was a good ‘Come to Christ’ moment with one of the companies AKW, where one of the people was like, "What kind of man wears makeup?" And I was like, "I'm not a man, and when I get you in the ring, I'm gonna beat you up."

I got him in the ring, and I beat him up. So it was a nice little complete story circle.

I can't say that I've ever felt maligned for gender, but I've definitely felt stereotyped for race. And as somebody who's working to build bridges and make in-roads, it has been a very eye-opening experience. As somebody who gets perceived as a Black male, and as somebody who is a Black trans woman, I would really like for us to have our own spaces. So much is tied to race because no one is just a girl or a boy, I truly believe there is a racialized gender.

If I was the reason why a queer person got into wrestling as a trainee, that would put me over the moon. One of my proudest moments in my career is getting to go to Singapore and wrestle Erfie – just two gays fighting for a championship. If I could get just more gay people involved, more queer people involved – gee, that would be money.

I would love it if us queer, trans and non-binary wrestlers weren't just brought in as a novelty act. I’d love it if we were just brought in to clang and bang, and really show that we can do it.

I see things going in the right way in terms of representation, where a lot of companies have explicit goals in mind. I want to keep that energy going forward, but I don't just want representation. I want the system to be broken so we can remake it the right way, leaving behind its anti-worker culture, labor abuses, and bad labor practices in general.

If I'm trying to decompress from the transphobia and stereotypes imposed around race, usually I will grab either a glass of wine (or a bottle) and unwind by listening to some music, reading, and playing some video games.

Just average things you know, I'm still a normal girl.

What is holding wrestling back from being gender affirmative?

In considering how sports can be a space of comfort as opposed to surveillance, I would start with the question: What is the inherent point of sports?

Sports as they exist are heavily commoditized. You have the advertisement space, the marketing space, the "traditions" and stuff. With traditions, you have the cultural cachet, where it's like, "You play football because you're a boy."

Any other form of football has to be specially marketed as ‘ladies football’ or ‘lingerie football.’

No disrespect to those women. I've seen Lingerie Football and they're crazy. No disrespect. But look at the way that the WNBA is talked about – women who play basketball can go all around the world and make money as basketball players, but in America, they're a punch line.

So as far as wrestling being a space or anything being a space for gender affirmations, I think it just has to do with a Super Culture, which is already homophobic and transphobic. There's very strict gender roles for, "If you do this, you are this. You can't do this and be this."

Michael Sam, the first publicly gay player to be drafted in the NFL, was a Southeastern Conference (SEC) Defensive Player of the Year and they started talking about how he shouldn't even have been drafted, and he got cut almost immediately. Was that because he was a bad football player or because he was bringing "unwanted attention" for being gay?

Darren Young is an openly gay wrestler in WWE. He didn't really make much noise, he just won the Tag Team title and then got fired. Now he's in New Japan.

It’s all a very old-school way of thinking – these archaic ideas for gender roles, which are very hard to break, with a performance that is the reality for a lot of people.

If you are not performing the role that you’re assigned to an adequate level, then you will be either replaced or forced to conform. If you somehow manage to not be replaced or forced to conform, you will still just be maligned. At least in my experience.