Miss Marijuana Pageant founder won’t allow trans contestants, but there’s more to the story

Howard R. Baer’s competition will be restricted to natural born women only. Since making the announcement, he has come out and explained why his stance is neither sexist or transphobic.

Many of the articles I had seen online were quick to lampoon Mr. Baer for his comments that the majority of transgender people “have not had the operation” and that “most of the men still look like men.” But my curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to call him myself, as to hear it from the horse's mouth rather than receive potential misinformation.

I had seen original reports that the pageant was limited to the United States, which left me confused. As we all know, Canada has just recently legalized Marijuana in October of 2018, leaving a clear untapped market for the competition.

I raised this concern to Mr. Baer who decided to clear the air on this. “It’s the United States and Canada, I think we have about 400-500 girls from Canada already signed up.”

I asked if he thought he was getting more interest from Canada with it’s small population compared to the U.S., to which he chuckled and asked “I don’t know? What’s the population of Canada?”

I let him know that Canada is similar in size to California in population, with each near the 38 million mark.

“We’ve got well over 5000 girls signed up already. I’m just gonna guess that we’ve got somewhere between 300-500 from Canada. It’s pretty substantial. The truth is, initially, we didn’t have Canada on there, but then one of our major sponsors is from Canada, so we put it on there and it’s been really good.”

The parameters as to what Miss Marijuana entails was a bit of a mystery to me. Mainly, I wondered, does the future Miss Marijuana need to have an extensive knowledge about weed? And does she even need to smoke weed herself?

“At this point almost everyone knows about marijuana. Our thing is that we don’t want to force young girls to smoke marijuana, that’s for damn sure. Our main thing is that they’re pro-marijuana, not against it. You can’t be campaigning against marijuana.

Marijuana friendly is mainly the thing. Some people vape, some people chew gummies, some people use CBD.They aren’t smoking it, and to us they don’t have to be.”

Another question I had was concerning the prizes. On the website, the winner receives $25,000 and “a vehicle. In the example photo, a Jeep Rubicon is shown, but underneath the photo there’s a clear footnote that states, “vehicle shown for example only.”

I wondered to myself, is this not the vehicle that will be won? Although it is true that a vehicle will be won, Baer informed me that there has not been consensus yet as to what the car will be, but he’s leaning towards the Jeep.

And of course, I had to ask Mr. Baer about his comments on “natural born women” being the only contestants allowed in the Miss Marijuana pageant.

Again, i was a bit confused, and so I asked Mr. Baer the question we were all wondering: What if they’re really passable?

“The problem with it is, you’ve got a lot of them who have not had the operation, and we’ve got a lot of young girls, as young as 18, girls going to the pageant, I spoke with a lot of them and the general perception is that they feel uncomfortable walking in there with someone that has what you or I have. Right?”

Mr. Baer says he’s acting from a place of understanding. “I totally get that. I wouldn’t want her in there if that were the case. I don’t want people uncomfortable. It’s not the mainstream by any means. I’m not against it. I run two websites that are LGBT friendly, it’s not a prejudice or anything like that. Will we change it five years from now? Maybe! I don’t know.”

On top of that, Mr. Baer is quick to point out that his rules are more lenient than the rules surrounding other competitions. He says that Mrs. Universe is really the only competition that allows trans people in their competition.

“The fact is that, when you look at the comparisons, to Miss USA, or any of them, they won't allow someone that’s married, that has kids, that’s pregnant, that’s had an abortion. They have to be 100% naturally born, that’s the way they are. We don’t have any of those rules here. You have to be single, because it’s miss marijuana. If you have kids, fine.If you were once married? Fine, if you had an abortion, fine. We’re the easiest going ones out there. And we’re getting slaughtered for it.”

For more information on the Miss Marijuana pageant, you can find all the information needed here. What do you think of the pageant? Let us know in the comments below.