Nyla Rose Explains Why AEW Hasn’t Mentioned Her Transgender Status On Dynamite

Nyla Rose is AEW Women’s World Champion. As a transgender woman, she’s drawn a considerable amount of attention to herself. The company has yet to mention her transgender status on television.

TV Insider recently spoke to Nyla Rose. She discussed AEW not drawing a focus to her transgender status in their storylines. It’s not about AEW being “hush hush” about it, but they want to make sure that people know her as a performer before anything.

For me, it has been welcoming that they don’t make it a spectacle. They don’t make it a checkmark. It’s one of those things that is there. Everyone knows about it, but nobody talks about it. That’s not a matter of us wanting to be hush-hush or hide this. They’re not making it a thing because it shouldn’t be a thing. You are a person and a performer first.

That’s what I love so much and makes me feel so proud to be part of this company because they are helping normalize these ideals. We don’t even have a sense or consensus of how many trans people there are because so many people are afraid to speak out and speak up and live so openly. That’s because there is such a stigma of what being trans is. With representation on weekly television and with AEW being the company that it is on the scale that it is, with TNT and the scale they are on, they see me as a person.

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They see me as someone going out there and doing their job. The transness being secondary or even third to anything else. That is a beautiful statement. It shouldn’t matter and doesn’t. Hopefully, we can get to the point where people stop making it be the frontrunner.

AEW received some criticism from Jim Cornette over not using Nyla Rose’s transgender status to draw heat. Val Venis was the loudest detractor of AEW’s booking strategy for Rose.

Cody Rhodes spoke about the criticisms and he said the best answer is to “not hit the ball back” to them. AEW might address Nyla Rose’s transgender status eventually. They wanted to introduce the Native Beast first.