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On the night of her 60th birthday, Sally Goldner climbed on to the top rope of the wrestling ring, to the roars of the crowd, and launched herself on to her competitors with a missile dropkick. The crowd roared. For a second, she was completely airborne, before landing on her opponents.
“‘Wow, I’m doing this,’” she thought. “Exhilarating. I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather be doing on my birthday.” She had seized her moment in an Alpha Pro battle royal, a multi-competitor elimination match. As her opponents – all men – threw her out of the ring, they wished her a happy birthday.
Goldner, who lives in Melbourne, Australia, has been a lifelong fan of wrestling. As a child, she watched it on TV and at the city’s Festival Hall. “I was always fascinated by it,” she says. She remembers exactly where she sat in the arena to watch Harley Race and Ron Miller do battle in 1977.
Back home, she would shift the coffee table and roll around the lounge floor or bounce off the couches – the seat, arms and back were “three turnbuckles in each corner”.
But something about wrestling felt off. “Most of the representation seemed to be burly cisgender men … A lot of the storylines reflected queerphobia,” she says. “While I was aware of something about myself, I didn’t know I was trans, or understand what that meant.”
At her all-boys school, Goldner hated sport, and was bullied. Her grades deteriorated. She had to focus on her studies, and even give up music, which she loved, handing back her beloved violin in tears to the music teacher. Fifty years on, it remains a painful memory.
After school, she followed her parents’ advice and majored in accountancy. She worked through her 20s: it was easy but soul-destroying. “You’re like an engine that’s using 5% of its capacity,” a careers adviser told her. It was the trigger, along with listening to kd lang’s 1992 album Ingenue, “to question lots of things I’d taken for granted”.
Since the age of nine, Goldner had held a picture in her head “of looking like a woman”. A friend helped her to find a knowledgable psychologist – where, aged 29, she heard, for the first time, the word “transgender”.
“I said to myself, ‘Well, I’ve gone a long way down, unknowingly going against myself. I wonder what would happen if I went with myself?”
She joined trans groups, and initially didn’t think about permanently identifying as a woman. “It sort of crept up,” she says. In her mid-30s, she founded Transgender Victoria, a community organisation working to achieve better social, economic and health outcomes for trans people. Goldner put “heart and soul” into the job, but it wore her down. She stepped back from management and left her role at TV in 2019.
The lack of a meaningful outlet left her feeling stifled. Over the years, she had “tried drag queen and drag king, standup comedy, acting”. A creative voice had tried to find its way out ever since she’d handed back her violin decades earlier. Now she dreamed of being a wrestling announcer or commentator. Sometimes, she spontaneously commentated from the crowd, and people loved it.
In 2023, when she was 57, she signed up for training at Melbourne’s Relentless School of Pro Wrestling. First she had to learn how to get in and out of the ring “without looking like a doofus”, then how to do forward and backward rolls. “It was the best I had ever felt in my body.”
Over the following days, her inner critics harangued her. “‘You’re too old, not fit enough, not strong enough,’” she says. “But my heart kept saying, ‘You want to do this.’”
Goldner’s 60th year has been transformative. She has been diagnosed with ADHD and autism; “just like when I found out about being trans, my mind became more settled”.
She regularly contributes as a ring announcer and commentator, and, six months ago, she made her in-ring debut under the wrestling name Zali Gold; three syllables make better chants.
Many pro wrestling organisations in Australia run mixed wrestling events. Goldner competes in battle royals, with and against men and women. The matches are scripted and agreed with participants in advance.
Since performing the missile dropkick off the top rail, Goldner is building her move set, and plans to make her singles or tag debut.
