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By the Associated Press
11/07/2018 | 07:19 pm
The first transgender woman to participate in the Miss Universe contest wants to make history a reference for trans children and adolescents around the world, whether or not they have the international title of beauty.
26-year-old model and activist Ángela Ponce survived 20 other candidates for the Miss Univers Spain national contest on June 29, qualifying for the world contest, which only allows for the participation of trans women since 2012. [19659003"Simadémarcheicicontribueàfairforwardingtheworldofsmallpaspourmoic"Isapersonalpersonwhowillalwaysstaywithme"saidPonce
Wherever the event is this year, the place and date must be announced. We plan to use it as a platform to note high rates of suicide among transgender teens and how legal codes continue to discriminate against trans men and women around the world. world
"I think it's important that someone say that I'm here and that I'm part of the diversity of what a woman is and that I have the same rights as everyone else, "he told the Associated Press. center of Madrid.
Angela Ponce responds to her "hateful" by breaking diagrams like a transgender queen
"If I give them something, it's natural," said the first transgender woman to win the Miss Universe Spain
The Spanish capital has just finished the week of gay pride celebrations in 2018. On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people marched in a festive and demanding atmosphere to demand the equality and greater visibility of the people. having a binary sexual identity.
Activists welcomed the recent decision of the World Health Organization to eliminate trans identities from its list of mental disorders.
But protesters also took advantage of demonstrations to highlight discrimination against transgender people of all ages, including their difficulties in finding a job. A study published last year by the European Transgender Collective Platform TGEU revealed that 77.5% of the 885 transgender people over the age of 16 surveyed in Georgia, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Sweden had suicide and that 24.5% of them had tried it at least once.
Ponce says she protested whenever she was selected for a fashion event or photo shoot to be rejected once the designers or organizers learned that she had undergone a sex change operation. But in those moments, his life motto "Being the best is not an option, it's an obligation" gave him the strength to go from the front to " close a lot of mouths and leave a lot of others open ".
His experience in "a family with a lot of love and a lot of respect" but without any reference in a small town in the south of Spain, near Seville, can also be useful for d & # 39; others, said Ponce.
With Internet as the sole source of information, a documentary on television showed at the age of 13 that Ponce had a name for what he felt. She also opened the double task of searching for more clues, both for herself and to educate her loved ones, her social circle and even the family doctor with whom she began her physical transition.
"My parents never had to go to school so that nothing would change, no, that was me," said Ponce, who said that he was meeting separately each new teacher and said: "Even if on the list, the king) Felipe VI, call me Angela."
Years later, the support that she received the first time that she visited a catwalk in an amateur fashion show aroused his interest in modeling and led to eventual victories in provincial beauty pageants.
When Miss Spain's crown was over on her head at the end of last month's ceremony in northeastern Spain, Ponce said that at that moment she wanted to close his eyes and focus on the victory: "I wanted to feel when they put the crown on me because I knew that I was living a historic moment."
In 2012, a competitor of 23 A year ago threatened to sue when she was banned from participating in the Miss Universe Canada contest because she was not a "natural" woman.
Jenna Talackova hired Gloria Allred, a prominent women's rights advocate, to challenge the veto, but the organization, then led by Donald Trump, finally gave in before the case was over. brought before the courts.
Trump, who sold the Miss Universe brand before becoming president of the United States, said at the time that it was not necessary that the contest apologize to from Talackova.
"If she competes, it's wonderful, and if she does not want to compete because she thinks maybe she can not win, that's okay too." crazy, "Trump told the TMZ celebrity website.
Talackova came in among the finalists in the Canadian competition, but did not win and therefore could not participate in the Miss Universe.
Six years later, Ponce claims that transphobia continues to be a global problem, even in Spain, a country that sees itself as a pioneer in the protection of LGBTI rights and among the members of the community of which it is concerned. is part of it.
Among the hundreds of messages of support that flooded social networks after Ponce's victory in Miss Spain, users identified as feminists, homosexuals or transgendered also criticized the fact that this type of contest reduces women to objects of physical beauty and they do not contribute to the normalization of trans people.
"If it is people who demand equality and who criticize me, how real is what we are demonstrating in the street?" Ponce questioned, adding that he saw it as a valid form of activism turning his personal victory into a win for all transgender people.
"We can not be hypocrites," he said. "Beauty sells, if you sell to buy clothes, bread and even a can of tuna, you should also help us to send an equal message."
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