Everything was compared with genders in gyms. And I always heard, you know, "You can spar Shelly." And they would respond, "No, Shelly doesn't know how to punch, I need to spar Brad, he knows how to hit me."

I know this sounds really horrible, and I don't like it, I don't agree -- a lot of the guys were telling me, "Oh, she wants to be hit? We'll hit her." And you just sit there going, "For the love of Christ!"

That bothered me, because the men in the gyms, these particular males, were all about, "Well, if she wants to be treated like a man, we're going to treat her like a man."

That's how they treated each other: "Oh, well if a 16-year-old kid wants to get in there, let's show him how it is."

So it's all about ego. But to do that to a woman, it's to me, it's degrading her. But unfortunately the women who walk into the environment get mentally challenged with, "You have to be better than a man."

So it's these environments that create toxicity, but they're so different from what I would experience because people would tell me, "Mate if you want to be a good boxer, you've got to beat up that 80 kilo guy."

My trainer was 6ft 2 inches and about 95 kilos, and if you didn't spar him, you weren't seen as a man. So you take the beating, and I would, I'd get bashed up and I'd be like, "Go home, cry in the car."

Because you just had no choice, that was the mentality.

The stigma behind gender would be there even if there were no women in the gym because the gender roles would then turn into who's stronger than who.

When a lot of women in the gym are smaller than men, the dynamic in weight is different – to me it's not a bad thing. I couldn't care less.

Continued…