Kylan Wenzel, who is competing to
become Miss California, says she has dreamed of this moment since she
was 11.
The 26-year-old Wenzel appeared Friday
on Anderson Live to discuss being Miss USA's first transgender
contestant after the pageant changed its rules in April.
“This has been a dream since I was
11,” she told host Anderson Cooper. “So I kind of just put it
out to the universe and hoping it would happen. And then it
happened. So I moved my surgery up six months, I resigned from my
job. Ever since then I've been just working on hoping to become Miss
California.”
“I've always felt like I was a girl,”
Wenzel said in response to Cooper's question on when she began to
feel that she was a woman. “It took a little longer for me to
process it. But yes, I was definitely a woman.” (The video is
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Wenzel is among the 229 women who will
compete on Saturday, January 12 for a chance to become one of the 20
contestants who will go on to compete in the final show the following
day.