Is America ready for a transgender height model?
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Tyra Banks seems to imagine so -- or at least, she seems to think that a transgender model ought to be able to strut, pose and vogue alongside distaff hopefuls in a tender to prove she's the next grown thing.
Banks' show "America's Next Top Model" will debut Isis, its first transgendered contestant, when it begins its 11th season Sept. 3. It's a progressive move for a network reality series, but pushing the envelope, in the modeling realm and on TV, has become the MO of "ANTM": The show has cast multiple gay contestants, and net season crowned a plus-size model as its winner.
"We want to redefine what beauty is," said executive director producer Ken Mok. "You can be tall, you can be short, you can be plus size, you backside be transgendered; you don't have to be what the modelling industry says you experience to be. That was one of Tyra's original missions."
Mok and Banks didn't set out searching for a transgender model for "ANTM's" eleventh season, in which 14 wannabe catwalkers vie for a contract with Cover Girl cosmetics and mental representation by Elite Model Management. They establish Isis, 22, when she was surviving in a homeless shelter "ANTM" visited last time of year for a photo shoot that paired contestants with disadvantaged girls.
"She participated in the inject and we didn't have it off anything around her," Mok said. "But when we started reviewing the photos, the girl that unbroken popping out of the background was Isis. She really knew what she was doing. Tyra wanted to have it off who she was. It was clear she real had a passion for modeling. So when it came to casting this season, we said, 'Why don't we find that girl?'"
Leggy and lean, Isis looks wish she commode strut with the best of them. Still physically male, Isis is rescue money to afford a sex change operation, Mok said.
She's non the kickoff transgender person to break into the modeling world: In the '80s, Teri Toye and Billy Beyond modeled for Chanel and Todd Oldham, respectively. Model-turned-pop singer Amanda Lear built her life history in the 1970s on keeping her sex position ambiguous. (Word on the street was she was born a man.)
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