After winning Spain’s national beauty contest last month, Ms. Ponce will become the first transgender woman to compete in the Miss Universe pageant. But she is also on a mission to challenge traditional concepts of gender and beauty, as well as to break down what she sees as unacceptable barriers in the fashion industry.
“Having a vagina doesn’t make a woman,” she said in an interview. “Even if many people don’t want to see me as a woman, I clearly belong among them.”
Ms. Ponce, 27, grew up in Pilas, a town in southern Spain where her father owned a bar that is now managed by her elder brother. Pilas was a conservative place, she says, where “there was nobody like me.” That extended to her school, which also set her apart, placing her in a group of children needing special care, alongside some who were dealing with family breakups or who belonged to the minority Roma community.
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When she was about 16, Ms. Ponce decided to undergo hormonal treatment and eventually vaginal plastic surgery, “to remove what for me was a burden and a trauma.” But she said that her message to the teenagers whom she now meets is always that vaginal surgery is a personal choice, and that it is not essential to being a woman.
“There are women with a penis and men with a vagina, because the only key part of being a woman is to be and feel like a woman,” she said.
Her recent success as a beauty queen has brought her admirers, but also plenty of attacks — mostly from other women, she said.
“What strikes me is that a lot of the criticism has come from women and people from my own collective, just when women are taking to the streets to ask for recognition,” she said. “I find it weird that some women don’t tolerate that I go to a competition to represent my country as the woman that I am.”
She added: “If we want progress, we just have to stop looking whether what other women are doing is good or not.”
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Under a previous Socialist administration, Spain also became in 2004 one of the first nations to legalize same-sex marriage. “Compared to other countries, I’m lucky to have been born here,” Ms. Ponce said.
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In fact, she said that much of the recent social media criticism against her came from women overseas, who believe that she will have an unfair advantage over other national beauty queens when she participates in the Miss Universe pageant later this year. Apart from her genital surgery, Ms. Ponce said the only other procedure she has undergone was plastic surgery to enlarge her breasts, following her hormonal treatment.
“When I hear that all the girls won’t be competing in equal conditions, I say that’s right, but only because I’ve actually had to make double the amount of efforts to get there, because I wasn’t gifted everything by nature,” she said. “My face has always been my face, whether you like it or not, and the same for my waist.”
“Women own their bodies, and many of them have had plastic surgery, so how is reshaping your nose or your cheek bones to make you feel better any different to getting a vagina or breast enlargement?” (Rhinoplasty is a far cry from getting a fancy new vagina, lol)
Ms. Ponce also lamented what she described as the hypocrisy of some big clothing brands that refused her as a model once they found out that she was transgender. “There are brands that are happy for you to buy and wear their clothing but not to have you on their catwalk,” she said. “It’s strange coming from a world of fashion that claims to be setting trends.”
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Spanish tranny to compete in Miss Universe contest
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Originally Posted by Anti Federalist
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