Ain't no rule...but you're being disqualified anyway

**dasNdanger** · 03-27-2012, 07:13 AM

On the news this morning, they did show in the Miss U rules where it says a contestant must be a natural-born female. Not sure if that's in the Canadian rulebook, but it is in the overall Miss U rulebook, which oversees all Miss U pageants around the world.

There are many pageants for specific groups of people (black pageants and asian pageants, for instance), even a transgendered pageant. No one expects someone who is not black to enter a black pageant, or a naturally born female to enter a transgendered pageant. In fact, if someone did challenge the rules to those contests, they would be vilified. So I have no problem with her not being allowed to compete under the Miss U universal rules. Even though she is female now, she may have certain advantages over a natural born female, such as height, strength, and body structure, and so I can understand some people having trouble seeing her as completely equal to all the other contestants.

Now, that said, I will say that since Jenna was very open about being a transgendered woman, and if the pageant knew this rule existed from the beginning, they should never have let it go this far, and they should have made the rules very clear form the beginning.

das

**Morrison_Lad** · 03-27-2012, 07:23 AM

I'm sorry, but I totally disagree das.

She's a woman. This is a pageant for women. How can it be wrong for her to participate? Or, more to the point, how can it be right to eliminate her?

She's not a guy who looks like a woman. She's a woman, end of story.

**JBK405** · 03-27-2012, 07:25 AM

So it is in the rules? Huh, the article I read said it isn't (It had the "natural born female" ruling, but it said that was just what was said, not that it was an actual rule on the books).

**Morrison_Lad** · 03-27-2012, 07:29 AM

Originally Posted by JBK405

So it is in the rules? Huh, the article I read said it isn't (It had the "natural born female" ruling, but it said that was just what was said, not that it was an actual rule on the books).

Yeah, the first article I read about it said the same.

I don't care. Now, instead of the pageant runners being total assholes, it's the people making the rules. It still sucks and is unfair and completely ignorant.

**JBK405** · 03-27-2012, 07:33 AM

Das, can you give a link to the rulebook, or where it was quoted? I'm curious as to the actual phrasing.

**ConnorHawke** · 03-27-2012, 07:49 AM

I feel these pageants discriminate against the majority of women. If one does actually fit their narrow beauty standards (IMHO), you have to be under 27, childless, can't ever have been married.

I don't know. I definitely don't envy the plight of transgendered people and they have to put up with a lot of shit.
But can't say I'm too sympathetic about this since it's a shallow type of competition with shallow standards and always has been.

Ineligible to participate? Well, you're in good company.

**dasNdanger** · 03-27-2012, 07:50 AM

This is where I saw it - http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headline...er-contestant/

There is a video in the post, after the commerical. However, that doesn't seem to be the video I saw (the one I saw talked about Trump, and showed a page of the rule book).

@ Morrison Lad - I'm going to have to respectfully disagree, too. Yes, she may be a woman in appearance and behavior, but she still has that pesky Y chromosome that tells her body otherwise. My neighbor had gender reassignment surgery, and try as she might she still had male traits, especially concerning her physical build. A person's physical build does come into play in such things as 'beauty' contests, and I can understand naturally born females feeling that they cannot equally compete against someone who they may see as having an advantage over them by being born male. The contest needs to be fair to all, not to just one.

das

**Lady_Hawkeye** · 03-27-2012, 07:50 AM

Guess I should get my saying in there seeing as I'm both Canadian and transsexual.

Being transsexual his indeed A LOT more than just cosmetic changes. I remember as a 5-6 year old child asking my mom when I would get to live as a girl. And it only gets worse as puberty hits. You know, feel, think and act as a woman and then you look in the mirror and you see a boy looking back. It's such a frustrating, depressing thing to go through it's even difficult to type here what goes through your mind.

I was lucky to have an understanding family ( some of my friends where kicked out of home because of this) but still going through transition is about as fun as an amputation without anasthetics. Society tends to ridicule what is different and when you are at that stage of "half and half". You get looks everywhere, comments, people will insult you and so on and so on and yet you feel like it's such a path worth fighting for that you will plow through all of that.

I am 35 now and I have been living and working as a woman for 5-8 years and it took me a while to get to see a spychiatrist ( a must in order to advance in the transition) because in Canada, until January 2009, we where not really anything here and our healthcare would not cover us so it was truly a nightmare getting help. But, eventually I did and now I have been on hormones for almost ten months now, Hormones that for the first 3 months gave me nausea, hot flashes and huge huge fatigue spells until my body slowly started to adjust. I still get awful mood swings and pain from my ever changing body now from the hormones as I am basically going through a second puberty as the doctors who now follow me explained. If things go as planned, in about a year, I should be going under the knife for my sexual reasignment surgery. Now I am now saying this as a complaint but mostly to explain how serious we take this and that it's so much more than just us waking up one morning and saying " I'm a girl now".

The best way I can explain I guess is that imagine someone who has lost his sight or ability to walk and that person would ear about this crazy long and costly procedure that would sometime hurt and make him somewhat of a pariah in society, well I am willing to bet that this person would still go through all of this to regain what was lost to him or her. It's what being transsexual feels to me.

Sorry for the rambling by the way

I'll post my thought about the beauty pageant and the whole legal thingy of it a bit later while I collect my thoughts.

Bye for now

Catherine

**dasNdanger** · 03-27-2012, 07:52 AM

Okay, here's the report I saw this morning:

http://gma.yahoo.com/video/news-2679...-28745645.html

das

**Morrison_Lad** · 03-27-2012, 07:56 AM

Originally Posted by dasNdanger

@ Morrison Lad - I'm going to have to respectfully disagree, too. Yes, she may be a woman in appearance and behavior, but she still has that pesky Y chromosome that tells her body otherwise. My neighbor had gender reassignment surgery, and try as she might she still had male traits, especially concerning her physical build. A person's physical build does come into play in such things as 'beauty' contests, and I can understand naturally born females feeling that they cannot equally compete against someone who they may see as having an advantage over them by being born male. The contest needs to be fair to all, not to just one.

das

OK, I wanted to ask this earlier, but forgot.

How would a woman with a more male-looking physique have an advantage over someone like this (Leila Lopes, current Miss Universe):

I'm confused by that argument, frankly. Maybe I'm missing something. But I really don't get how someone like Lopes or Irina Shayk or whoever would be at a *disadvantage* to someone with a "more male physique."