WWE’s first transgender star Gabbi Tuft opens up about transitioning

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More than a decade ago, Tyler Reks defined the WWE with his signature maneuver so devastating it was dubbed the “Burning Hammer.”

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The Dreadlocked Demolition Man was a regular on Smackdown, Superstars and NXT before leaving WWE in 2012.

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Then the former WWE star, now Gabbi Tuft, came out as transgender in 2021 and is now opening up about what it took to achieve a feminine physique in a profile post.

“It took a lot of trial and error to get the female body I always wanted,” Tuft wrote in this week insider.

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“Before transitioning, I was a WWE star, weighed 280 pounds and had 6 to 8 percent body fat.”

Plus, at 6 feet 3 inches tall, she was full of muscle, to which Tuft said, “At my peak, I looked like a cross between Ragnar Lothbrok and…” Vikings and The Mountain of game of Thrones.”

Tuft admitted that when she was younger, she secretly dressed in her mother’s clothes, but the COVID pandemic allowed her to reflect on her identity and she began cross-dressing.

In her early 40s, she decided to make the transition.

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Hormone therapy helped lose all muscle mass, and since Tuft was already an expert in fitness and nutrition, she was able to experiment with diet and exercise to find what her new body needed best.

It took two years, but she found “a path to the appropriate, feminine aesthetic I was looking for,” she wrote in Insider.

Tuft described each transition journey as “unique,” ​​but said hers was about focusing on “developing strength — inside and out.”

“I lost 190 pounds of weight and muscle mass, but my transition didn’t happen overnight,” she wrote of what she called her “ugly duckling phase.”

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“I felt discouraged at times, especially when what was staring back at me in the mirror didn’t match the image I had of myself in my head.”

Tuft, now a fitness and nutrition coach, has more than 152,000 followers on Instagram and shares her journey, nutrition and lifestyle tips.

“It’s an evolutionary process that is not only physical and nutritional, but also mental and emotional,” she wrote in Insider.

“I specialize in helping women break out of cyclical behaviors, and that’s exactly what I needed to do when I was trying to shed the muscles that ruled my life before transitioning.”

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