The operator of the Miss United States of America beauty pageant cannot be forced to include transgender participants in their competition, according to a federal appeals court.
The lawsuit was filed in Oregon by Anita Green, a transgender woman, who said the pageant operator deliberately violated Oregon’s anti-discrimination law by denying Green the opportunity to compete.
The operator countered that the competition had the right under the First Amendment to include only “natural born women.” The court agreed.
“Miss United States of America expresses its message in part through whom it chooses as its contestants, and the First Amendment affords it the right to do so… Given a pageant’s competitive and performative structure, it is clear that who competes and succeeds in a pageant is how the pageant speaks,” Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke wrote in his opinion.
An appellate court says a national beauty pageant has the right to exclude a transgender woman from competing. A lawsuit filed by Anita Green says the pageant violated an Oregon state anti-discrimination law when it barred her from competing in 2019. https://t.co/pSo2Cd9kcd
— The Associated Press (@AP) November 4, 2022
Green, who is transgender, has competed in several pageants including Miss Montana USA, Miss Earth and Ms. World Universal. She was living in Clackamas, Oregon and was preparing to compete in the Miss United States of America’s Miss Oregon pageant when she said the organization rejected her application because it did not consider her to be a “natural born female.”
Green sued, contending the organization was violating a state law that makes it illegal to deny public accommodations to people based on their sex or gender identity.
But attorneys for the Miss United States of America Pageants said the pageant program was designed to celebrate and promote “natural born women,” by sending a message of “biological female empowerment.” The pageant has several requirements for contestants, including some based on contestants’ age, marital status and gender identity.
No matter how many ways trans activists try to fit a square peg in a round hole, they fail. This is a question of “playing pretend.” How many people can trans activists and radical Democrats get to pretend up is down, black is white, and men are actually women? It’s mind-boggling when you consider that there is little or no science backing up their contentious theories.
Millions of people cannot be suffering from gender dysphoria — a real psychological condition that afflicts mostly men and is not helped by “transitioning” those afflicted from male to female. And to foist this ideology on young children is unspeakably cruel in almost all cases.
Green said in her suit that the beauty pageant was “on the wrong side of history.” Let’s hope not. In fact, we should hope that this is a signpost on the way back to sanity.
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