Dobbs’ loss to Cowboy Blvck was both histrionic and homoerotic. Blvk pulled down Dobbs’ salmon shorts to reveal tighty-whities that said “Trust Fund Baby.” Blvck then feigned punches that left Dobbs covered in fake blood.
The crowd booed when Dobbs’ villainous “dude-bro” persona had the cowboy on their back for a moment, and ultimately cheered as the cowboy beat the kind of entitled frat boy everyone in the crowd loved to hate.
Glenna Gordon for NBC News
Performer Claude Grossi said he always wanted to wrestle as a kid.
“My brothers wrestled in high school and college, but my parents never let me. ‘Oh, we don’t want our little girl getting hurt,’” Grossi recalled his parents saying.
Like many of the performers there that night, Grossi said that acceptance from family and friends is layered: They might feel loved as individuals, but not accepted as trans men.
“They’re accepting in their own way,” Cornelius Vango, who performs as Soft Hands, said of their grandparents, who live in rural Minnesota.
They still use she/her pronouns for Vango, they said, but they treat Vango “like a dude.”
“You pick your battles,” Vango said, holding a hotel-sized bottle of expensive Aesop lotion. To keep their hands soft, of course.