'We're Not Beasts, We're Just People'

Trans MMA fighter Alana McLaughlin on coping with societal and family of being the 'bigger person' expectations

- ALANA MCLAUGHLIN

I HATE BEING TOLD TO BE THE bigger person. I've never been the bigger person. I was a skinny little runt—a little too wild. A little too fey. I was undersized for my age. Everyone was bigger than me.

At age ten, I could wear the same clothes as my sister who was three years my junior. When I was bullied and beaten, my cries for justice fell on deaf ears. My failure to stand up for myself was an inconvenience to my parents and teachers.

It was up to me to "stop being a target".

From my earliest memories it was made clear to me that tenderness and beauty weren't for me. That I was too soft. Too weak. I wasn't supposed to play with the girls. I wasn't supposed to dance. I shouldn't read so much. I shouldn't have been drawing flowers. My interest in dance and theater and art was inappropriate. I needed to go outside and do something constructive.

That wasn't me though. I was shy and quiet and grappling with traumas I wouldn't fully understand or have the tools to combat until well into my adulthood. The environment I grew up in was the source of many of these traumas, and it didn't give me the tools I needed to navigate my circumstances.

The church I grew up in attempted to isolate themselves from the world. TV, movies, and popular music were worldly and sinful and to be avoided. In spite of this I still managed to see a TV special on Christine Jorgensen upon her death in 1989, and this was where I first found words to describe someone like me. Transsexual.