This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
All Elite Wrestling star Nyla Rose is putting boots to asses, naming names and shaming lames. That’s the name of the fame game: Hardly content to keep her public thrashings constrained to a ring, this transgender wrestler turned up on a podcast to tell us all something.
Her message is as follows: The Oklahoma State Athletic Commission is a scam, a veritable nest of bigots intent on sucking the joy and love out of sport in Oklahoma, and while it may be the Sooner State, I’d sooner see Nyla kick ass somewhere that isn’t chock full o’ transphobes.
In case you aren’t in the know —I am not, I had to look all this up because my apathy towards athletics is so profound it extends even to “fake” sports!—Nyla Rose is a trans wrestler who performs for All Elite Wrestling, the second-largest professional wrestling promotion in the whole world, apparently.
If you aren’t American and don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, it would be my pleasure to inform you! Professional wrestling is a combat sport focused more on feats of showmanship, extremely campy acting, and impressive athletic accomplishments. You may hear naysayers decry pro wrestling as “fake,” but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Of course, the leotard-clad meatheads delivering dramatic heel turn one liners and pummeling one another for an audience are just acting, so pro wrestling is “fake” in that regard, but the reality is that they’re putting on a grand performance and their stage is a ring.
Rose ran afoul of the OSAC back in 2023 for daring to wrassle a cisgender woman in a “Ring of Honor” match in Oklahoma City. Somehow, cisgender wrestler Alejandra Lion, Rose’s opponent in the RoH match, was not shattered into a million pieces and killed in all timelines just for entering into athletic competition with a trans woman. Sadly, merely surviving the match was not enough: OSAC issued a warning to AEW after they learned of the match, because their rules state that “males and females” cannot compete against one another.
OSAC defines a “male participant” as “a person of the heterogametic sex born with XY chromosomes,” and a “female participant” as “a person born of the homogametic sex with XX chromosomes.”
So, you know… that clears that up. I guess. Can somebody double check my homogametic sex? I’m not even sure where I am right now.
At the time, AEW (and RoH) owner Tony Khan expressed disappointment over OSAC’s threats of punitive actions: “I don’t think we did anything wrong. I’m really shocked by it. I don’t think there should be discrimination against transgender wrestlers, or transgender people at all. They have rights. To that end, I absolutely stand by Nyla Rose. AEW stands by Nyla Rose and all transgender people who want to play sports.”
Hell yeah, Tony Khan. True allyship is vehemently defending the right to compete of your world-first trans pro wrestling star in the pro wrestling promotion you own and operate. If you are cis and find yourself failing to live up to that exact, specific standard… please do better.
Unfortunately, perhaps out of an abundance of caution, Rose has not competed in Oklahoma since that December 2023 match.
Speaking to wrestling news font Denise Salcedo on Tuesday, Rose said of the OSAC: “The athletic commission is a scam. They’re just a bunch of greedy people who have found an avenue to work people out of money, and they’re using new laws and loopholes to do what they want to do, basically.”
Rose isn’t even the first trans person the OSAC has discriminated against! As far back as 2022, they’ve been forcing trans wrestlers (and presumably other, lesser athletes) to compete against the wrong people. It’s a disgrace! It’s a travesty! And it begs the question: What the hell is the OSAC’s problem? Seriously, pro wrestling? It’s made up, dude! They aren’t really slugging it out! Sure, all those guys in the ‘80s and ‘90s were beating the brakes off each other and coping with the severe physical trauma by abusing enough hard drugs to kill a horse, but times have changed.
I don’t want to take anything away from pro wrestling. It is an inherently queer form of entertainment, with all the camp and swagger. I think it’s great. I’d love to see more trans people participating… but they certainly won’t be doing it in the great state of Other Texas, and that’s a shame. There’s no rational way to justify a ban on trans participation in a sport that’s primarily about theatricality. When pro wrestlers perform together, they aren’t competing to show which one of them is the most athletic. You don’t get a score in pro wrestling.
Regrettably, this is another tragedy of the culture war I don’t imagine will resolve in our favor anytime soon. In the meantime, trans people will just have to wrestle in normal states that don’t hate our guts.
