Tatyana Dvazhdova, a 22-year-old female boxer from Russia doesn’t consider herself weaker than a man, and to prove this point she spent years hiding her gender and fighting male boxers under the fake name “Vladimir”.

During a conference called “International Women’s Day – Feminism, Socialism, Sexism”, Tatyana Dvazhdova revealed that a few years ago she posed as a male boxer in order to fight against other men and prove that she was their equal. The muscular woman cut her hair short, let her body hair grow and did everything she could to conceal her female traits. She even got a fake ID and fought under the name Vladimir Ermolaev , winning 9 out of her 17 boxing matches. Tatyana proved her point, that women can compete against men in boxing, but as soon as she revealed her true identity, she was banned from competing against men.

Photo: @tanya_giena/Instagram

“All was good until one day my trainer told me I’d be fighting a girl soon. I told him I wanted to fight a man as I felt like I could do it and beat them. He said rules don’t let females officially fight males. That is when I left the club,” Dvazhdova recalled about her early days in boxing. “I always wanted to fight only with men because they say females are weaker and I wanted to prove the opposite.”

After leaving her club, Tatyana, who has been boxing since she was 16, turned to street fights, where she reportedly only went against men. Eventually, she returned to her first love, boxing, but this time she wouldn’t be denied the opportunity to prove herself men’s equal. She became Vladimir Ermolaev, and for years managed to conceal her true gender.

“I tried not to talk to my opponents, not to say a word to not be exposed,” Tatyana said. “The guy whom I beat didn’t even know I was a girl.”

The female boxer’s story originally came out in 2017, and she has since been busy fighting against gender discrimination and equal opportunity, both inside and outside the boxing ring. She has boycotted women’s boxing matches asking officials to change the rules and allow her and other women boxers to fight against men, but has yet to achieve success.

Tatyana says that she faces discrimination on the job as well. She works as a loader, a job typically done by men, and a lot of people cancel their order the moment they learn she is a woman. I guess that is their loss, as she seems way stronger than the average man.