With Liz Carmouche taking center stage Saturday in the main event of UFC on ESPN+ 14, where she’ll challenge Valentina Shevchenko for the flyweight title, it’s a reminder just how far LGBT athletes have progressed in the sport of mixed martial arts in a short period of time. When Carmouche came out publicly as lesbian earlier in her career, it was a gigantic deal, the stuff of major feature articles in mainstream sports outlets . Carmouche was called the “first openly LGBT fighter at a major level” so often, you would have thought it was part of her name on her official birth certificate. Nowadays, it seems like almost an afterthought. Sometimes it seems like there are as many out lesbian fighters in the UFC as there are heterosexual fighters.
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