United States of America Pageants can exclude trans contestants, court rules

A pageant operator in the U.S. can ban transgender contestants, an appeals court in San Francisco ruled Wednesday.

In a 2-1 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that United States of America Pageants (USOA) can continue to exclude trans women who want to compete in their pageants, in accordance with a rule that states that only “natural born” women qualify to compete.

The case made its way to court in late 2019 after Anita Green, an Oregon-born contestant, filed a lawsuit against Miss United States of America — which does business as USOA and has no connection to Miss USA — saying that she had been excluded from participating in the pageant because she’s transgender.

Green, who made headlines in 2017 after she became the first openly trans woman to compete in Miss Montana USA, claimed that USOA’s “natural born female” rule was discriminatory because it denied her “the full and equal advantages and privileges of [USOA’s] services in violation of Oregon’s public accommodations law.”

Last year a district court judge in Portland ruled in favor of USOA, whose motto is “to empower women, inspire others, and uplift everyone,” according to its website.

Green appealed, but on Wednesday, the appeals court found that the Oregon law, which prohibits discrimination based on gender identity in public accommodations, would violate the pageant’s free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution. The two-judge majority agreed that the pageant expresses its views on “American womanhood” by selecting who competes.

“It is commonly understood that beauty pageants are generally designed to express the ‘ideal vision of American womanhood,’” Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, wrote. He was joined by Circuit Judge Carlos Bea, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush.

Circuit Judge Susan Graber, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, wrote in a dissenting opinion that “the majority opinion marks a radical departure from the well-settled principle that we should consider non-constitutional grounds for decision before reaching constitutional issues.”