VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Alana McLaughlin On Her Journey From Special Forces Sergeant To Trans MMA Icon

Alana McLaughlin sat down to discuss her journey from a bigoted town in the south to the second openly transgender woman to compete in MMA in her new uInterview.

“Growing up as a queer kid in the South in the 90s went about as you would expect,” she told uInterview founder Erik Meers. “There was a lot of bullying, there was some abuse…it wasn’t an easy time.”

Raised with unsupportive parents, McLaughlin lamented, “They still go to church five times a week. And we haven’t spoken since 2016. It still bothers me a lot…I think everybody wants their parents to care about them, but some of us don’t have that luxury.”

McLaughlin described how her parents influenced her decision to enter the military; “When I joined up it was because I had expressed to my parents that I was still having issues around my gender and I needed something to change. And the solutions that they had didn’t really work for me, and I told them it was that or I guess I’d just go get myself killed at war. And they seemed to feel like that was the preferable outcome.”

Of her experience of combat, McLaughlin remembered, “It puts you in a certain mindset. You don’t think of people as people, you think of them as obstacles to overcome…I would say this is probably the case for most combat soldiers, there’s a sort of dehumanization not only of the enemy but of yourself as well.”

A long-time martial arts fan, McLaughin’s interest in the MMA was fueled by her work in combat. “As far as MMA goes, I was always kind of a fan of it,” she said. “I always had an interest, but I guess when I was in the army is when I really got into it, I was paying for pay-per-views, I was watching every fight I could get my hands on. And it was just something that held my interest, it applied to the work I was doing at the time and ultimately things just kind of fell into place and I went for it.”

Unfightable will have a one-week run in New York from Sept. 13, then a week-long run in Los Angeles, before it premieres in English on Fuse and in Spanish on ViX.

Fallon Fox was the first openly transgender woman to compete in the MMA in 2014.