The Elodie Gossuin Affair Miss France 2001 may be a man!

One of the stranger news stories of 2001 concerns Miss France 2001, Mlle Elodie Gossuin. This 20-year-old French student nurse and beauty queen briefly became the most famous transsexual woman since Dana International won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1998 when it was reported by an Internet newspaper that she might in fact be a man!

Mlle Elodie Gossuin won the regional Miss Picardie beauty queen pageant, held at St Quentin on 4 November 2000. This qualified her for the Miss France 2001 competition held in Monaco, which she in turn duly won on 9 December 2000.

11 million television viewers saw the election of the prettiest girl of France. The first winner of the third millennium, the beauty has achieved a dream. Elodie's win of the Miss France 2001 pageant received huge publicity in France. Also, winning the Miss France pageant qualified her for the Miss Universe 2001 pageant to be on held on the 11th May 2001 in Puerto Rico.

But before this, the world was to be stunned by reports that she was in a fact a male transvestite, or a post-operative transsexual. The rumors started on 8 January 2001 when the French language Internet newspaper L'Examineur published the report.

Mlle Gossuin arrived in Puerto Rico on Monday, 23 April to prepare for the pageant. Unfortunately the initial reaction of the Miss Universe organizers to Elodie's arrival wasn't very helpful in refuting the "Miss France is a man" allegation. Officials told reporters that Miss Gossuin was due to be interrogated about whether she was a transsexual or a transvestite. "At the moment we're treating her as a normal delegate," said Mary Hilliard McMillan, a spokesman for Miss Universe, who added that a doctor was being called in to examine Mlle Gossuin. "Our regulations say that all delegates must be natural-born females. If she does turn out to be a man, we'll put her on the first plane back to France. ... She is going through registration and being fitted for a gown and swimsuit.

A "close inspection" during swimsuit and ball gown fittings apparently left most officials convinced. Stylists declared that if Elodie were a man there was no way she could have hid it - "She was totally at ease in all her bathing suits," explained Karyl Gonzales, one of the pageant's wardrobe stylists, "[She had] a body to die for."

On the Tuesday Ms McMillan stated: "So far, all signs point to the fact that she's a female. She has a birth certificate that says she is a woman and she is one of the most stunning women I've ever seen. She's very feminine.”.

The issue was finally officially resolved when the officials decided to impose on Elodie a rule which was supposed to go in to effect for the next contest, in 2002. A few years earlier the Miss Universe officials had learnt about a male-to-female transsexual who had won a female beauty contest in Asia, they decided to update a rule that required contestants be a 'female citizen' of their countries and also require them to be a 'natural born woman'. Miss Gossuin duly signed a declaration that she was a French woman and promising 'I have never been a man'.

A few hours later, Hilliard McMillan finally dismissed the transsexual allegation as just a nasty rumor; she said that if there were a problem it would have been detected in the swimsuit fitting.  "I have just seen her and she is beautiful, absolutely stunning, and she is in fact a female. ...  We have not needed to do any medical tests or anything like that - she is definitely a woman. ....  She is what she says she is.  There is no doubt.  She's gorgeous and everything is going ahead as planned."

Elodie broke her own self-imposed silence on the Wednesday, she was adamant in her denial of the allegations stating, "Absolutely not!  .... Because the rumors are so unfounded, I will move ahead and have a great time."  Also on the Wednesday Frederic Royer, editor of L'Examineur admitted that the original story was intended as a satirical joke and he could not believe that it had been taken so seriously. Her ordeal finally over, Elodie competed in the main Miss Universe Pageant on 11th of May, reaching the evening gown competition as one of the top ten finalists. 

The suspicion has to be that the organizers of Miss Universe, and perhaps Elodie herself, didn't take the rumors seriously enough, or they may have been operating on an "any publicity is good publicity" basis until it all got completely out of hand.  Apparently at one point some of the other beauty queens got very jealous about all the publicity Miss France was receiving!  If the sex of Miss France was really in any doubt, the Miss Universe organizers could have approached her for evidence that she was a "natural born woman" before she arrived in Puerto Rico for the pageant on Monday 23 April.  Instead, just as the pageant preliminaries began, the story exploded in to a major news item that was run by most of the worlds TV and press, and media interest in Elodie reached astonishing heights.  The Miss Universe organizers may not have been totally unhappy with this outcome, and the media were also perhaps happy to have a good, juicy, gossip story to fill their pages and airtime, no matter how unlikely it might be.

The Non-Evidence
The core of the original L'Examineur story was a completely unsupported claim that Elodie Gossuin was actually the female persona of a male transvestite (Nicolas Levanneur), this was always very implausible given the revealing nature of all Beauty Contests - and for a man to escape detection in at least three major Beauty Pageants stretched credibility.  Also, no pictures of Mr Levanneur were ever produced for comparison with Miss Gossuin. This major problem was avoided in some later reports by instead alleging that Elodie was a post-operative male-to-female transsexual woman.  

The physical evidence that Elodie was a transvestite male, or more probably a post-operative male-to-female seems to have been based on a very few items of insubstantial evidence: She is at about 5’ 11", very tall for a lady, she has large hands and quite big feet and she appeared rather older than her claimed 19 years.

She had some facial scars, most notably an obvious scar between her eyebrows, which could be evidence of extensive plastic surgery for facial feminization.

These points are all minor, circumstantial and inclusive. Even in total they are hardly serious evidence of transsexuality, let alone convincing proof.  Many beauty queens and models are exceptionally tall, many women have large hands, and as Miss Brazil noted, undoubtedly many of the girls in the Miss Universe contest had been surgically "enhanced", including herself 17 times!  Elodie though pointed out that the contestants in the Miss France Pageant are forbidden to have cosmetic surgery or liposuction.  Otherwise, she would have had a scar near her eyebrow, which was caused by a childhood accident, removed.  She stated, "You have to be completely natural." Elodie also freely admitted that she was in fact now 20 years old, her birthday being just a week after the Miss France contest.  At worse, she perhaps has an unusual amount of neck and eye wrinkles for someone of her youthful age.

Conclusion
Overall, given the complete lack of real evidence, the fact that the world press widely reported the story in various forms is quite astonishing.  It's also amazing that press and the Miss Universe organizers appeared to actually gave the story some credence, initially at least.  Understandably this all became very upsetting for Miss Gossuin.

The whole "Miss France is a Man!" affair was effectively a media invention, which most affected the unfortunate victim, Miss Gossuin.  However, the sensationalist way in which the story was presented casts a worrying light on how transsexual women are still perceived by the press and public.  As Dana International has also shown recently, the days when a beautiful transsexual women will be simply regarded as a beautiful woman is still sometime away, at least in the so called "western" world. 

Other Transsexual "Exposure's"
Mlle Elodie is far from being the first woman who at some time has experienced the misfortune of being alleged, almost certainly falsely, of being a transsexual.  For example American actress Eileen Davidson has similarly suffered since gossip about her having being a man first appeared in the mid -1980's.