Today a peculiar event took place. A transgender woman called Anne Veriato defeated a man in an MMA fight in Brazil.

Veriato is 21 and has been training and competing in jiu jitsu since she was 7.

Veriato scored a unanimous decision victory over Railson Paixao in their strawweight bout. Veriato was on the attack for most of the fight, chaning submissions attempts, triangle chokes and armbars, but Paixao was able to escape each time.

”I’ve been fighting jiu-jitsu for years, and I wanted to do something different,” Veriato told MMA Fighting. “A lot of people in my team fight MMA already, and I wanted to do it as well.”

”When I entered the mat to compete, they always thought I was in the wrong category, asked for documents and everything,” she said. “My opponents and their teams always said ‘You’re fighting her? Ok, this is going to be easy.’ Every time I won, they would come up to me and apologize. I kept competing and winning tournaments, and people started to respect me.”

”It was a bit hard for people to get used to it in the gym,” she said. “I left the gym for a while and when I came back, no one recognized me. It’s all good now because they were used to it, but it was different in tournaments.”

Here is an amateur filming of the fight. We’ll upload a better one asap.

”This [fighter] is a phenom in jiu-jitsu, and you look at [her], it’s a woman,” promoter for MR Cage told MMA Fighting. “They asked me for an opportunity. My answer was ‘I can give you an opportunity, but at Mr. Cage, men fight men, it doesn’t matter if you have a penis or not. If you were born a man, you’ll fight a man.’ [She] said ‘that’s exactly what I want.’”

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 ”It’s only fair to fight men,” Veriato said. “It never crossed my mind to fight a woman because I think I’m too good. If I beat men my entire career, I can still beat them despite the hormone process. I only know that I’m good after I beat men. That’s what makes me happy and hungrier to train. I don’t think it’s fair to fight women.”