I think it would have been fair to have a rule saying “no surgical modifications”… because doing things like facelift, nose-job, breast/buttox implants, cheek lifts, wrinkle removal, etc, are obviously unfair advantages (in a beauty contest) for those who have the money pay for it; and having a generic blanket rule like that would have accomplished the same thing they were trying to accomplish without being so blatantly transphobic… so a rule like what they have only proves that they are both despicable AND dumb. The entire notion of beauty pageants is outdated and stupid if you ask me.

I think it would have been fair to have a rule saying “no surgical modifications”…

How are you intending to prove that that? Only the bad surgery makes itself obvious.

Like any kind of contest, finding rules violations is hard and not foolproof. It’s like sports that forbid using steroids - competitors do regularly take those substances while training, then quit taking them for competition and go uncaught. Competitors who are discovered later to have been violating rules are stripped of titles.

That said, I don’t think it’s a very controversial concept that a beauty pageant shouldn’t be a contest about who had the best surgeons.

They are absurd and it’ll probably be a good thing when we’ve got past their existence. But the problem here is that proving surgery is essentially impossible. It’s quite unlike drugs that you can test for. Maybe implants you could test for but that’s just one thing, and I’m not sure that beauty pageants even have the kind of budget required for advanced tests.

One of the contest’s rules says you can’t participate if you willingly had a nude photo took in your lifetime. Good luck probing that (not even considering how it’s a honeypot for revenge porn to surface)