CHATTANOOGA, Tenn.—Women will no longer have to fight men who say they’re women in jiu-jitsu competitions held by the North American Grappling Association (NAGA).
The policy change, announced in October, comes after nearly a year of tournaments that permitted men who identify as women to fight women.
For some competitors, it’s good news, but it’s far too late.
Tom Gallicchio, co-owner of a jiu-jitsu training club in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is angry that it took so long for the organization to kick men out of the women’s category.
Jiu-jitsu is a martial art that involves grappling, ground fighting, and submission holds designed to force a competitor to give up. It also can be called “submission wrestling.”
That’s why he felt that he couldn’t “just stand by and let [men fighting women] happen as man, as a human,” said Mr. Gallicchio, co-owner of Militia Mixed Martial Arts and American Jiu-Jitsu.
He dropped his business affiliation with NAGA because of the organization’s previous willingness to allow male-versus-female competitive fights. It put women in danger, and it went against his conscience, he said.
For Mr. Gallicchio and the members of his club, the issue of men fighting women hits too close to home.
In 2022, his club’s members went to a NAGA tournament in Georgia, and they were shocked to see women competitors put in matches against Corissa Griffith, a man who said that he identified as a woman. They also were shocked by Mr. Griffith’s appearance.
Unlike the other competitors, who wore only close-fitting wrestling garments called rash guards, Mr. Griffith stood out, competing while wearing a wig and a pink T-shirt atop his rash guard, Mr. Gallicchio told The Epoch Times.
“It was like [he was] trying to be excessive to be seen more,” he said.
His wife, Stephanie Gallicchio, who’s co-owner of the club, recalled Mr. Griffith’s performance at a previous men’s tournament. He lost fight after fight, she said.
But then, Ms. Gallicchio said, he switched to participating in the women’s division. He’s since won at least four medals fighting women, The Epoch Times confirmed.
Men Fighting Women
Ms. Gallicchio has achieved the jiu-jitsu rank of brown belt, a task that takes about three years of regular training.But in a real fight, a man wearing a beginner’s white belt can beat a woman who has advanced to brown belt, she said.
“Our bodies are completely different,” Ms. Gallicchio said. “If a white belt male came in here, I would give him a fight. But if he wanted to kill me, he could kill me.”
Learning that she would face Mr. Griffith in a tournament came as a surprise to Charity Gordy, a female jiu-jitsu fighter in Chattanooga.
But Ms. Gallicchio, her coach, was adamant that she shouldn’t fight a man, Ms. Gordy told The Epoch Times.
In casual practice, it would be OK, Ms. Gallicchio had said. But she felt strongly that the fight would be too dangerous.
So, Ms. Gordy backed out of the competition. However, two other women fought Mr. Griffith, she said.
“One girl—she held her own for a little bit,” Ms. Gordy said. “But [the male competitor] basically just kind of threw them around.”
She said that her husband, who also competes in jiu-jitsu, told tournament organizers that he was willing to identify as a woman, with the goal of being allowed to fight Mr. Griffith.
Organizers declined his request.
“So, [Mr. Griffith] can do it because he tells you he identifies as a woman?” Ms. Gordy’s husband asked organizers, she said, and he argued, “I’m telling you, I will put on a wig,” too.
Bone-Breaking Power
In jiu-jitsu, male competitors sometimes break bones while fighting, Mr. Gallicchio said.
It’s far easier for a man to break a woman’s arm than a man’s arm, he said. Their increased bone density, greater muscle mass, and sometimes superior height mean that male competitors can seriously injure female competitors, he said.
In the intense aggression of competition, it’s easy to make mistakes, Mr. Gallicchio said.
Even worse, a man entering a women’s league could be doing so because he enjoys the opportunity to beat up women, he said.
Although this motivation may not drive every man trying to enter women’s jiu-jitsu, opening the sport to men makes it possible for predatory men to enter, Mr. Gallicchio said.
When it comes to evaluating the danger of mismatched competitors, fighting sports aren’t like basketball, running, or swimming, Mr. Gallicchio, a world champion at the Maximal Fighting Championship with 18 years of jiu-jitsu training, said.
Competitive “submission wrestling” such as jiu-jitsu relies on inflicting “pain and damage” on an opponent until the opponent “taps out” or submits, he said.
That makes it an outrage that fighting leagues have waited so long to ban male-versus-female fights, Mr. Gallicchio said.
A Policy Likely to Spread
NAGA’s engagement with transgender issues came about a year ago, NAGA President Kipp Kollar told The Epoch Times.
The organization recognized a man who identified as a woman as a “transgender woman,” he said.
Before that, “there were not transgender women competing in our tournaments,” Mr. Kollar said. “It did not exist.”
After the first fight that athlete had against a woman, either the woman or her coach said that it was unfair for her to have fought a man, he said, and NAGA responded by refunding the woman’s entry fee.
From then on, NAGA slated matches of male competitors who identified as women only against women who consented to fight them, Mr. Kollar said.
Even though NAGA refunded the entry fee for her own competition, Ms. Gordy said that it didn’t take the sting out of the experience. After three months of training five days a week to prepare for the tournament, she felt angry and humiliated.
NAGA updated its policy in October to end competitive fights between males and females after a case of mistaken identity. A man who identifies as a woman fooled NAGA officials into letting him compete against a woman without disclosing it to her first.
He looked enough like a woman that he caught NAGA staff off guard, Mr. Kollar said. They discovered that he was a man after the fight.
“We hope that the simplicity of this revised policy will help to avoid any future occurrences where transgender females enter women divisions,” the new policy reads.
The thinking is that “if you’re born a male, you need to compete with the males, and if you’re born a female, you need to compete with the females,” Mr. Kollar said.
This decision likely will have major downstream effects in the martial arts world, he said, as NAGA is the world’s largest grappling association, and smaller associations often follow its rules and guidelines.
On Nov. 1, the Abu Dhabi Combat Club (ADCC), another worldwide wrestling association, announced on Instagram that it would also separate its fight categories between male and female.
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an LGBT activist group with political influence around the world, didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.
However, on the organization’s website, President Kelley Robinson is quoted as saying that state laws barring men from playing women’s sports are “wrong.”
The Compromise Ends
If a woman who identifies as male had asked NAGA to include her in the men’s league, nobody would have “an issue with that because [the woman is] already at a disadvantage,” Mr. Kollar said.Transgenderism may be a “difficult thing,” he said, but in the end, fairness must prevail.
Mr. Kollar said that even if his own son identified as a girl, he would want him to compete against men, not women. “That is where I would have to intervene as a father,” he said.
