I'm a woman who's been in a man's sport since the age of 15, and to see people finally seeing what I saw right from the start, that female fighters are just as good 'pound-for-pound' as our male counterparts.

People like myself have been pushing, competing, and promoting female MMA for a long time, and to see the fans accept a female division in the UFC so quickly is vindication that all that hard work amounted to something.

I did see the Yahoo Sports story Kevin Iole wrote about how the ratings for TUF go up when there's a women's fight in the episode. I can't lie: it felt really good to see that the UFC fans - not only MMA fans but fans of the UFC who maybe hadn't seen any female fights before February of this year - look forward to watching the women fights so much.

I think we've broken a lot of barriers and kind of shattered our glass ceiling that was there for women. There are so many great fighters, and we've proved a lot of people wrong. A lot of the times, our fights are the best fights on the card.

We don't have any kind of sponsors. The players invest themselves. They need money. They need resources... That's why, in sports and teams, they have sponsors - in soccer, in the NFL. Everyone has sponsors who invest and help to pay daily expenses.

We have a lot of great lesbian role models in tennis. I mean, Martina Navratilova in her heyday was probably the greatest female athlete on the planet. Martina just kept breaking every rule. That's a great role model.

When I was a kid growing up, my dad being a football coach, he asked the same question of all the assistants that he ever hired: 'Is your goal to be a head football coach?'

I was always a thin kid; I was an athlete.