Julian Erosa Calls Out Transgender Swimmer Lia Thomas After UFC on ESPN 53 Win

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.

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?”