A federal court has granted a US beauty pageant the right to prevent transgender women from competing in its pageants.
On Wednesday, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth District affirmed a previous ruling in favor of Miss United States of America LLC in a 2019 lawsuit from Anita Green, a resident of Oregon who is transgender.
According to the ruling, the pageant’s right to deny Green is protected under the First Amendment.
Green began messaging Tanice Smith, the national director of the pageant, about competing for Miss Oregon in 2018, the New York Post reports.
“You know I’m transgender, right,” Green wrote in a message to Smith, according to the 106-page opinion. “Your rules seem to discriminate against transgender women.”
After Smith responded offering to help Green find a pageant she “would qualify for,” Green hinted at taking legal action against the organization.
“I’ll talk to my attorney about this then because discrimination is unacceptable,” she wrote, the court said.
In her lawsuit, Green alleged she was denied entry to the Miss Oregon pageant based on the organization’s “natural-born female” rule, which she says is a violation of the Oregon Public Accommodations Act.
According to the OPAA, “all Oregonians have the right to full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of any place of public accommodation, without any distinction, discrimination or restriction on account of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, marital status or age (above 18).”
Lawyers for Miss United States argued that including Green in its pageant would “compel it to express a message with which it disagrees,” and infringe upon its First Amendment right, according to court documents.
“The pageant would not be able to communicate ‘the celebration of biological women’ if it were forced to allow Green to participate,” the opinion reads. “The Pageant expresses its message in part through whom it chooses as its contestants, and the First Amendment affords it the right to do so.”
Miss United States is not the same as the Miss USA Organization, which is the televised beauty-pageant arm of the Miss Universe Organization.
Isabella Ilacqua founded the United States National Pageants organization in 1986. The pageant features eight divisions — Little Miss, Pre-Teen, Junior Teen, Teen, Miss, Ms., Ms. Woman, and Mrs. — according to its official site.
United States National Pageants didn’t immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, and Green declined to comment at this time.