Julian
Erosa chose to forgo his planned callout during his Octagon
interview at UFC
on ESPN 53, but he didn’t remain silent for the rest of the
night.
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After getting cracked by Ricardo
Ramos in opening exchanges, Erosa locked in a slick guillotine,
which earned him the tap less than halfway through the opening
frame. While “Juicy J” chose to skip his planned callout in the
Octagon, he went through with it during the post-fight media scrum.
Owing his dislike for “cheaters”, Erosa took a dig at controversial
transgender swimmer Lia Thomas. A former University of Pennsylvania
swimmer, Thomas underwent gender transition through hormone
replacement therapy. While Thomas competed for the University of
Pennsylvania men’s team in 2018-2019, she later went on to compete
for the women’s team and in January 2022 became the first openly
transgender athlete in history to win a NCAA Division 1
championship in any sport.
“I was gonna say that I don’t like cheaters. And so I don’t know
how you guys feel about this whole situation, but I don’t like
cheaters and so I wanted to call out Lia Thomas,” Erosa said. “I
wanted to encourage him from transition from women’s swimming into
women’s MMA and then I’ll transition into becoming a woman, and I’m
gonna beat that dude’s ass. That’s what I wanted to say because
it’s all about getting a little bit of shock value.
“But I mean in the world that we’re living in, there’s no common
sense anymore. It’s becoming a bit ridiculous and obviously that’s
one of the big things that’s kind of going on now. And I just don’t
agree with men in women’s sports, you know even the whole Fallon Fox
thing, guys that are fighting in women’s MMA and knocking them out.
It’s a bad look.”
Thomas has been a dividing personality, drawing criticism from the
likes of Ben Askren,
Jorge
Masvidal, Israel
Adesanya and Joe Rogan from the MMA community in the past. Like
Rogan, Erosa firmly believes a man has certain physical advantages
over a woman even after undergoing gender transition. While factors
like bone density become more significant in combat sports, Erosa
doesn’t envision a world where transgenders should be allowed to
compete against cisgender women in any sport.
“Absolutely not. No. I just fully believe if you went through your
male puberty, there’s nothing you can do, there’s nothing you can
give yourself to shrink your bones down, there’s nothing you can do
in that kind of sense. I mean the proof’s in the pudding right. You
have Mr. Thomas, whatever he was ranked as a man, he’s just beating
all the women. It’s obvious. Doesn’t matter how much estrogen
you’re taking. I think obviously we’re in a grey area but these
grey areas are stupid to me because it’s common sense.
“… It’s so funny to me that women will fight for their own spaces
and then they also fight for trans women to be in those spaces.
Like those are just men. When is it going to be where there’s going
to be hundreds of men in these sports and then it just becomes
another man sport?”