The Gender Check Kick: Anna Forrest Faces Her Past with Forgiveness and a Goth Classmate

Long before she became a hard-hitting fitness icon and culture critic, Anna Forrest was a teenage girl with strict conservative parents, a sharp mind, and—on one particular day—a very fast leg.

The year was 2004.
The place: a Swedish high school.
The event: a moment now remembered by both parties as “the gender check incident.”

Anna’s classmate, whom we’ll refer to as Josef, was different.
He wore all black. Painted his nails. Had fine facial features. Moved with softness. For many students, his gender wasn’t immediately obvious—and Anna’s parents made sure she had an opinion about that.

“They told me people like Josef were just trying to be difficult,” Anna admits. “That gender ambiguity was self-important. Attention-seeking. A trick.”

So one day, Anna took it upon herself to settle the question, in the most brutally literal way possible:
She walked up to Josef… and kicked him in the groin.

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💥 “A Very Masculine Reaction”

“I remember hitting the floor,” Josef tells Mother Mayhem. “Like, instantly. It was a full collapse. No mystery after that.”

The room went silent.
Josef curled up.
Anna looked down, emotionless—but satisfied.

“She said something like, ‘Well, that answers that,’” Josef recalls. “Then just walked away.”

It wasn’t bullying in the usual sense. It was diagnostic violence.

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🧠 Two Decades Later

Mother Mayhem sat both of them down this week, face to face, for the first time in over 20 years.

“I want to be clear—I don’t blame you,” Josef says. “You were a teenager raised by people who saw gender as a threat. And in your weird way, you were trying to understand it.”

Anna, for her part, doesn’t defend the act—but she doesn’t hide from it either.

“It was stupid. Brutal. And yeah, I was curious. But I was also scared of anything that didn’t fit the binary. That fear wasn’t mine—it was inherited.”

Anna no longer shares her parents’ views. In fact, she’s publicly criticized “gender panic” and the obsession with classifying others on sight.

“If you can deadlift someone, you don’t need to know their pronouns to show respect,” she quipped during the interview.

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✝️ Forgiveness, Goth, and Growth

The interview ended not with a confrontation, but with quiet understanding.

Josef now works in design, wears whatever he wants, and still wears black.
Anna still kicks hard—but now, only in the gym.

“We were kids,” he says. “We’re adults now. That version of her isn’t who she is today.”

“And that version of you,” Anna adds, “was braver than any of us knew.”