As she hears her name, the world’s first and only transgender professional MMA fighter steps up to the stage and the crowd goes…silent.

It’s a humid October night in Miami, and Fallon Fox is standing on a makeshift riser at the Newport Beachside Hotel Resort, looking out over a gathering of about a hundred MMA fans who have shown up at the poolside bar to hoist mojitos and watch the pre-fight weigh-in, which started two hours late. So by the time Fallon whips her T-shirt over her head and pulls off her jeans in a single swift movement, revealing a black string bikini with a big affliction logo on the ass, everybody’s pretty lit.

At five feet six and 37 years old, Fox is two inches shorter and eleven years older than her opponent for tomorrow night’s championship featherweight bout, Ashlee Evans-Smith, a former top college wrestler, one of the few women who will agree to fight her. Compact, with big shoulders, round breasts, and narrow hips, Fox is impressively fit but not cut. You can’t get a washboard when you pop sixteen milligrams of estrogen every morning. Your belly’s always going to have that sweet

girl-curve to it, even after months of dieting and training five hours a day, six days a week, for the biggest fight—by far—of your career.

The scale reads 144.8—two-tenths of a pound below the cap—but there’s none of the applause there was a few moments ago for Evans-Smith. The only sound besides some distorted Drake on the cheap sound system is the scraping of a metal folding chair on the cement.

Fox fles for two seconds and flashes the requisite smile for the TV cameras, her teeth brilliant against her mocha-latte skin, her hair an amber curtain. Maybe when she wins tomorrow, this shot will supplant the Internet trolls’ favorite, the one where they caught her from an angle that made her jaw look manly. Maybe it’s all starting to change, finally, and she can be just another female fighter grounding and pounding in the cage.

Or maybe not.

Kick her in the nuts! yells a guy waving a Dos Equis, breaking the silence as his girlfriend shushes him in mock horror. That’s all it takes: The cracks start to fly, fast and nasty. I bet she’s got it folded up somewhere in there! someone shouts from across the pool.

But Fox is gone already, through a side door and into an empty meeting room adjoining the bustling lobby. After starving herself for two days to make weight, she wants out of here and into a bowl of pasta, away from reporters and the crap hip-hop, away from the guys with their phones held high, hoping to snap a pic to text to their pals.

One last step, as the boxing-commission doctor hands her a small plastic cup: the pregnancy test, required of female fighters. In the right light, you can see it as progress.

I bet I pass, she deadpans softly, raising an arched eyebrow as she heads toward the ladies’ room, slicing through the scrum of tourists like a paring knife. For a moment at least, she’s just another cute girl in flip-flops by the beach.

Arguably there’s no safe place in the world for a woman who was born a male, but some places are safer than others. You can head for an anything-goes enclave like San Francisco or either of the Portlands, or maybe a Vermont hamlet where people keep to themselves.

But here is one destination you probably want to avoid: an octagonal metal cage with a sweat-slick canvas and 3,000 testosterone-jacked ticket holders yelling for your blood. Having spent pretty much your entire adult life longing to embody femininity in its purest form, you might not want to plunge into a world even more macho than football, a seething pit of male energy, all brutal precision, sharp kicks, and elbows to the jaw. A subculture not exactly known for its progressive gender politics.