Crowds roar around the ring as wrestlers try to pin each other down, wriggling out from each others grip before being muscled into submission again. In the next act, wrestlers dressed as Mario and Luigi fight each other with dildoes they use as swords. Next is a wrestler who takes a testosterone shot to a curated playlist in front of the crowd—a kind of political performance art piece. You never know what you might see when you walk into a T-Boy Wrestling event.
Founded nearly a year ago by Mich Miller and Adam Brandowski, T-Boy Wrestling is the sometimes wrestling, sometimes arty, always entertaining show and art project that’s taken the country by storm. Bradowski had started Trans Dudes of LA as a social for transmasculine and nonbinary people to meet and hang out, but after putting on his first wrestling performance with Miller, the pair knew they had something special. Twelve months and many shows later, it seems like they were right.
Now, with the help of coaches and seasoned grapplers, they’ve trained over 600 wrestlers for several multi-day shows across the country. The shows are as much about spectacle as they are about inclusion. “We are trans men and trans masculine, non binary people, and everyone in between,” says Miller. “If you apply for the show, and you think you belong on the show, then you're in.”
At it’s core, T-Boy Wrestling is an art project for Miller and Brandowski centered around connecting trans people. “It's much bigger than just a show that we produce,” Brandowski says. “it's an experience that these wrestlers have for two months building this team.” They practice twice a week, they meet other trans people in their city—in short, they’re building a community.
And since T-Boy Wrestling creates shows in cities around the country, that community starts to interconnect even further—a wrestler from New York meets one from Portland who knows one in Chicago. “We're connecting trans men and trans women and non binary people,” Miller says, “because—Goddamn—we're just way stronger together.”
Now is an especially important time for trans and queer solidarity. “There's so much rhetoric right now that's anti-trans,” Millers says, “and that is villainizing people in communities that are less than 1% of the population and who just want to be happy and full people in our communities.”
But the antidote—or part of it, at least—is finding ways to build real connection. “People are looking for any sort of real community building that's like, actually a good time,” Brandowski says. “It feels like we're going back in time,” Miller adds, “and T-boy wrestling feels like it's 100 years in the future.”
Miller and Brandowski have big plans for the future of T-Boy Wrestling. They’ll continue to bring it to more cities, and train even more wrestlers, but they’re dreaming bigger than that. “I even see a T-Boy Wrestling Las Vegas residency in the future,” Miller says, “where there's a billboard on the strip with trans-masculine and non-binary people looking sexy as fuck."
Photography by Clarke Stone Massei
