AEW need to stand in Nyla Rose’s corner against transphobic ‘fans’

This week on All Elite Wrestling, Nyla Rose made history in becoming the first openly transgender woman to hold the AEW Women’s Championship, or indeed any title in any major wrestling company. A truly momentous achievement which demonstrates how far professional wrestling has come, and yet predictably, Rose’s victory has brought the transphobes out in full force.

Transphobic abuse towards Nyla Rose is unfortunately nothing new. Rose’s wife has tweeted before about the transphobic chants directed towards the AEW star during live events. But her victory against former champion Riho seems to have further emboldened this unfortunate subsection of wrestling ‘fans’.

All Elite Wrestling made quite the statement of intent in a traditionally conservative industry by hiring diverse talent like Rose and Sonny Kiss, who is an openly gay Black man. And it does feel very much as though we are heading in the right direction, albeit slowly. While WWE’s grand total of one openly gay wrestler pales in comparison to the likes of Pro Wrestling: EVE – whose celebration of its diverse roster should be the industry standard – it is nonetheless a noticeable improvement from a company which has run several homophobic and transphobic segments over the years.

And yet we still have a way to go. From the uncomfortably transphobic ‘Bobby Lashley’s Sisters’ skit back in 2018 to just a few weeks ago, when WWE resurrected the shambling corpse of ‘Santina’ to compete in the Royal Rumble, there is still clearly a massive issue with professional wrestling and the perceived hilarity of ‘men in dresses’.

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The perpetuation of this culture is almost certainly a contributory factor in the non-kayfabe attitudes some fans exhibit towards Nyla Rose. And things are unlikely to improve as long as professional wrestling promotions continue to treat queerness as a punchline.

AEW’s hiring of Nyla Rose and Sonny Kiss is a step in the right direction. But to my mind, it is not sufficient for a company to merely hire diverse talent. The sad reality is that hostility towards LGBT+ performers still proliferates at unacceptable levels.

In such an environment, it is imperative that the companies hiring queer talent should also stand in their defence. What I mean by this is that when Nyla Rose’s title win is met with vitriol from the transphobic subsection of AEW’s broader audience, it behooves AEW as a company to state in no uncertain terms that their behaviour is unwelcome and intolerable.

A company who hires diverse performers and does not stand in their defence looks suspiciously like a company out to score brownie points. We do not live in an ideal world, and this truth is compounded in the environment of professional wrestling fandom, in which certain demographics have traditionally had the loudest voices.

AEW are surely savvy enough to recognise this; it is not for nothing that despite having only a small handful of LGBT+ wrestlers on their sizeable roster, they are nonetheless the most diverse of all the big American promotions. And this is exactly why they must be willing to do the work of standing by their roster – not just as a passive presence, but as an active voice. Otherwise, it all feels a little bit like hollow tokenism.

For all the vitriol, Rose’s win has also reminded us that the face of professional wrestling fandom is evolving. LGBTQ+ Pro Wrestling Community tweeted in defence of Rose, obtaining 3k likes and counting. Elsewhere, AEW star Dustin Rhodes spoke out against transphobia, noting that his son is trans. Professional wrestling is changing, and that is precisely why it’s so important to have champions like Nyla Rose.

It’s why we need trans champions, and queer champions, and champions of color. The reality is that trans and queer fans, and fans of color – and on a wider scale, women fans – are a permanent fixture in pro wrestling fandom, and the product we consume should reflect our presence.

Pro wrestling requires the buy-in of its audience; it is uniquely dependent on the full-throated participation of its fans to succeed. So when we see cisgender men in dresses lampooning womanhood, or gay marriage as a punchline to an ultimately unfunny joke, the message we receive is simple: this thing you love? It’s not for you.

And before any internet professors come at me to explain how wrestling isn’t actually for women, LGBT+ people and ethnic minorities, so go cry elsewhere, consider: even from a purely utilitarian point of view this is a garbage take. You’d have to be the worst businessman in the world to not want to monetise a new demographic.

WWE demonstrated considerable savvy with their inclusive Balor Club t-shirts; the Evolution PPV was a similarly cleverly designed cash grab. It’s cynical, yes, and it’s deeply imperfect as far as representation goes. But the sad fact is, when you’re part of a peripheral demographic, any indication that a company might consider people ‘like you’ anything other than anathema is welcome. We are well used to taking whatever crumbs are granted to us.

So when a company does something actually meaningful – such as granting their highest honour to a biracial transgender woman – the difference is stark. WWE give and take with the same hand; no number of rainbow shirts can erase the gross misogyny and transphobia of the Santina stunt.

By elevating Rose as champ, AEW are putting their money where their mouth is. They are making a tacit statement about the legitimacy of Rose as a women’s wrestling star. This is remarkable, and AEW should be praised for taking this step.

But while Rose is having to defend herself (quite ably, I should add) against any number of Twitter ‘gender experts’ – including Val Venis, who hasn’t been relevant in at least 20 years – it feels a little bit like she’s being hung out to dry.

It seems a little unbelievable that there should be any need to defend against people like this at all. Putting aside for a moment that at present, scholarly research does not prove that transgender athletes have a measurable advantage against cisgender competitors, it should not need to be pointed out that professional wrestling is scripted. Any and all arguments citing the ‘unfair advantage’ of a transgender athlete in a sport with predetermined outcomes deserve to be consigned immediately to the nearest bin.

This also points to a broader problem in transphobic ideology: that the assumption of innate biological advantage ignores the not-infrequent existence of big, strong cisgender women. Nyla Rose is billed at 5’7 and 180lb; her cisgender peers Alpha Female and Nia Jax are 6’1/194lb and 6’0/272lb respectively.

And yet nobody is foaming righteously at the mouth over the apparent advantage these women have over, say, Alexa Bliss (5’1/102lb), or Kacy Catanzaro (5’/95lb). I invite you to do the maths on this one.

Nyla Rose said, in an interview with Sports Illustrated:

"“If I can bear the weight, if I can hold up all the hatred and everything and carry that on my back, I know that I’m strong enough to do it. If the people out there need to beat me up and I need to absorb that so that the next generation, the youth, can have an easier time, I gladly welcome that.”"

Her strength, resolve and dogged determination to be her authentic self is commendable. But Nyla Rose should not be left to fight this battle alone.

Nyla Rose’s win is a significant step in the often fractious battle for equality, and it is something to be celebrated. We can hope that it signals an era in which LGBT+ pro wrestling fans no longer have to scrabble for cynical scraps of representation, targeting our collective wallets without ever really meaning anything.

But AEW’s silence in the face of transphobic fans, both in the online and real-world arenas, is rapidly becoming deafening. Fans who demean performers should not be welcome at any professional wrestling performance; hate speech of any kind should be condemned, not just by performers and fellow fans, but by the promotion itself.