Inside the camp, chaotic world of T Boy Wrestling

If you were in the Los Angeles Silver Lake Jewish Community Center on 21 September 2024, you would have witnessed the birth of a movement. Tucked inside the centre, on a mat one quarter of regulation size, 20 transmasculine wrestlers were being cheered on by a blaring crowd.

Ever since then, T Boy Wrestling has only grown, with shows taking place in New York, Chicago, Portland and a national tour planned for 2026. Although the show is a performance, the emotional connection between the community is very real. For years, transmasculine people have been rendered largely invisible in mainstream media – and for many of the people who attend T Boy Wrestling, this is the biggest crowd of transmascs they’ve ever been part of. 

T Boy Wrestling was created by Adam Brandowski and Mich Miller, a pair of artists who felt disconnected from LA’s queer scene for years. “If you saw another transmasculine person across the room, you might be worried that they didn’t want you to expose them, especially if you were not as passing – there were all these coded things happening for no reason,” says Miller. To create a space that centred transmascs, Brandowski and Miller created Trans Dudes of LA, where to begin with they hosted events like beach trips and picnics.

The idea for T Boy Wrestling came from their first drag show. Brandowski knew that he wanted to perform and reached out to one of his close friends. But when the pair realised they didn’t sing or dance or do drag, they decided to wrestle. From the outset, the goal was clear. “Our plan was: whoever can pin the other guy and kiss him wins,” says Brandowski. Although the match was thrown together quickly, the crowd went wild. 

As soon as the night was over, Brandowski and Miller began to plan their first dedicated wrestling event. Their desire was twofold: to create a space where the community could have fun and celebrate, but also because they “just really wanted athletes who are trans to have space in the world,” says Brandowski.

Although the production value has improved and the scale grown over time, the basic structure of a T Boy Wrestling event has stayed the same. Over the course of the night, anywhere between 150 to 180 wrestlers will compete in bouts that each last a couple of minutes. There’s a panel of judges – mainly trans activists, actors, musicians, and artists – who’ll award cash prizes for wrestling ability or titles like ‘Best in Show,’ ‘Best in Hoe,’ and ‘Best Pair’. The show is compared by comedienne Marley Gotterer, and each event features a half-time performance showcasing an up-and-coming trans musician. If that sounds like a lot to pack in, that’s because it is – T Boy Wrestling shows usually last about six hours.  

Would-be wrestlers sign up to compete through an online form. If you sign up, you’re guaranteed a space to perform as long as you’re one of the first 150 names on the list, which Brandowski and Miller believe is the key to creating a diverse event. The show also doesn’t pretend there’s any single, ‘right’ way to be transmasc. “That’s lame as fuck. We broke out of the box,” says Brandowski. “Saying ‘T Boy’ is not boy or man or dude. We're just using this language as a giant umbrella, and if you, as a trans person, feel like you fit under the umbrella, come under the umbrella with us.”

If you, as a trans person, feel like you fit under the umbrella, come under the umbrella with us

As you watch the show, you’ll see two styles of wrestling emerge. The first is traditional, folk-style wrestling, which sees two buff men beating-down, with the goal of pinning their opponent. Everyone who signs up for a traditional fight is offered free group-training with Paulo Diaz, a personal trainer with wrestling experience. Diaz himself wrestled at the very first event and understands why the sport is appealing to the crowd. “It’s very therapeutic for me to max out my physical ability [...] this feels like a safe way to get aggression out,” he says.

The second style of wrestling is closer to performance art, with matches inspired by WWE and Lucha Libre. These bouts are more choreographed, with people assuming the identities of different characters – cowboys and covens, spurned lovers and bullies – to build a narrative and put on a show. Blair Diamond, who has performed ten times at T Boy Wrestling, has a penchant for playing villains. “I have a small range of acting skills,” he says with a laugh.

In a recent performance, Diamond created Chad McBootlicker, a conservative MAGA bro whose victim was a “liberal, Antifa protestor”. “The worse the villain is, the better the victory is when it comes,” Diamond says. Through performance wrestling, the wrestlers have the opportunity to both comically play into and rally against the stereotypes placed upon them.

Brandowski and Miller didn’t set out to create an event that was expressly political, but it was an inescapable reality as “being trans is made inherently political by the outside world,” says Miller. Trans people’s participation in sports has become a particularly contentious topic in America, but the reality for T Boy Wrestling’s performers is that this is one of the only spaces they can feel truly safe. “When we are all together as a group at practice, we’re not thinking about our identity,” says Brandowski.

The goal of T Boy Wrestling was to create a space for the community insulated from any outside forces – a space for support, celebration, and joy. For Brandowski, one moment sticks out as emblematic of this: in the first T Boy Wrestling event, one of the performers took his shot of testosterone on stage. “The building was shaking. Screaming, stamping feet, everyone losing their minds. This was when they were starting to restrict access to trans healthcare,” says Brandowski. “And everyone in the room was rooting for this one trans guy and seeing his experience of joy as he took his shot”.

That wrestler was Arón Sánchez-Vidal, an educator from Los Angeles. As he began to prepare for the show, he knew that he needed to do something to set his match apart. “I did want to win the money, and I wanted the glory,” he says with a laugh. When he had the idea to take his shot onstage, he knew it was a winner. “It was as if I was a cis guy juicing up on steroids,” he says. “People get excited to see someone stab themselves. It’s kind of homoerotic.”

Although not every transmasc person takes testosterone, the shared celebration of his moment created a sense of unity. “As trans people, we shapeshift. We take what we have and create something entirely different out of it. We make our bodies into something that we’re proud of, whether medically transitioning, or working out a tonne, getting a haircut, or dressing in a non-conforming way,” says Sánchez-Vidal. “We change people's perceptions of us all the time. There’s nothing like us.”