Paula Oliveira has become the first transgender person to try and win the Miss BumBum competition.
The annual pageant show takes place in Brazil and aims to find the best bum in the country.
Each year 27 contestants who represent the country’s different states compete with the winner receiving 50,000 reals in endorsement deals.
Paula, who was born Vinicius Oliveira in Porto Alegre, is a 28-year-old transsexual dancer who has waited two years for her paperwork as ‘Paula’ to finally come through.
Six years ago she underwent sexual reassignment survey with the help of her father who got all the documentation required.
She told Amazonas News:
At 18 I arrived at my father’s and told him I was gay and he accepted this so, you know, it was all good.
It was him who got the sex exchange for me, the documents to change, he always ran after all of this for me.
If it were not for him I would not be trans operated nowadays.
When I started turning trans my mother did not accept it but nowadays they are good.
Paula is making quite the statement given Brazil is known for being prejudiced against both gay and transgender people.
Men’s magazine Playboy also decided to take a bold and remarkable step by featuring a transgender model on its front cover for the first time in the German edition of the magazine earlier this month.
21-year-old German model Giuliana Farfalla, will be featured topless on the front cover, which is traditional for Germany’s Playboy magazines.
While it is sure to court controversy for those who have yet to accept transgender identities, the magazine’s editor-in-chief Florian Boitin claimed the inclusion of Giuliana was in line with Hugh Hefner’s tradition of being ‘resolutely opposed [to] any form of exclusion and intolerance’.
Giuliana, who was born Pascal Radermacher in the south-western German city of Breisgau, is already well known in her home country.
She explains how since childhood she always felt like she was in the wrong body and at the age of 16 she underwent gender reassignment.
She posted a ‘safe for work’ preview of her upcoming cover with a caption saying:
My dears, I’m on the latest Playboy cover and very proud of the result. I hope you like the cover as much as I do.
Giuliana is not the first transgender model to be featured on the pages of Playboy, as the November issue last year featured transgender playmate Ines Rau in the magazine.
The first transgender model to appear on Playboy’s cover was Caroline ‘Tula’ Cossey who posed in 1981, shortly before appearing in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only.
10 years later, after it was revealed that Cossey was born a man, she posed for the magazine a second time.
