This is what I thought - I just wanted to make sure I hadn’t failed to consider something obvious. Am meeting up with some old friends who are science geeks next month and wanted to throw out the line “for all we know, the center of the galaxy exploded 25,999.9 years ago and we could all die tomorrow” and I didn’t want anyone coming back with “well actually…we would have detected that by now thanks to technology xyz that was in ivented in 20XX”.
I think it would have been fair to have a rule saying “no surgical modifications”… because doing things like facelift, nose-job, breast/buttox implants, cheek lifts, wrinkle removal, etc, are obviously unfair advantages (in a beauty contest) for those who have the money pay for it; and having a generic blanket rule like that would have accomplished the same thing they were trying to accomplish without being so blatantly transphobic… so a rule like what they have only proves that they are both despicable AND dumb. The entire notion of beauty pageants is outdated and stupid if you ask me.
Like any kind of contest, finding rules violations is hard and not foolproof. It’s like sports that forbid using steroids - competitors do regularly take those substances while training, then quit taking them for competition and go uncaught. Competitors who are discovered later to have been violating rules are stripped of titles.
That said, I don’t think it’s a very controversial concept that a beauty pageant shouldn’t be a contest about who could afford the best surgeons. Well - as I said earlier I think beauty pageants are absurd to begin with, but if they have to exist I don’t think it should be a contest between surgeons.