Even before it started, the first Miss Transgender pageant, the subject of a new BBC3 documentary, was attracting criticism.

Despite the owner and organiser Rachael Bailey repeatedly saying it wasn’t a beauty pageant, that is what it looked like – there was a talent round and one where contestants were asked to speak about their experiences as a transgender woman, but it seemed mostly to be about how they looked. Not only did it look horribly retrograde to rank women on looks, within the transgender community it came with added weight – the contestants would be essentially judged on whether they conformed to the stereotypical beauty ideals of a cisgender woman, and whether they could “pass” as one. Worse, said some, was the prize – £10,000 worth of gender confirmation surgery.

“We believe that access to hormones, surgeries and other transition-related treatments are basic, necessary, and life-saving,” wrote the campaigner Jess Bradley from Action for Trans Health. “They are not prizes akin to a cruise or an open-top car. Making them prizes just makes our basic healthcare needs seem like luxuries: cosmetic and elective.”

It is, says Damian Kavanagh, controller of BBC3, exactly the kind of documentary the channel should be doing, to “raise issues and subjects that will inform and provoke debate amongst young people.” And despite being filmed when BBC3 was still broadcast, director Jasleen Kaur Sethi says the new online-only channel is the right place for it. “It’s a different approach and you’re hoping something will go viral in a sense, that people will watch it and tell other people and it will build momentum rather than have a big opening. I think a lot of people find their television on iPlayer or catch-up services, not just young people. I’m pretty optimistic about it. I think it will find its audience.”

The film has its own website, with photographs and update videos of some of the contestants. Programme websites aren’t a new thing, but Sethi hopes a viewer will be more likely to see it if they’re already watching the film online; it’s a more seamless experience. “That’s one of the good things about BBC3 going online – there’s more content and you can update the stories. I’m really excited about that.”

There has been a lot to update. In the end, the winner didn’t want to have the surgery (this was another criticism – that it reinforced the idea that transgender people had to undergo surgery in order to be considered “genuine”, whereas many trans people choose not to). But even if she wanted to, she wouldn’t have been able to claim her prize. This month, she was stripped of her title by the organiser Rachael Bailey (Bailey wasn’t available to comment for this article).

“It was really shocking,” says Jai Dara Latto, who was crowned Miss Transgender at an event in London in September. “Even though I had been given the title, I was still not good enough, still not woman enough, still not able to join in with them. It was extremely childish and I tried to go above it and continue with what I’m doing but it was slowly getting to me.”

Immediately after she won, other contestants attacked her, saying she wasn’t a genuine transgender woman. Four months later, the organiser gave her title to another contestant, after watching the BBC3 documentary in which Latto is shown wearing male underwear and at the gym in what could be considered “male” shorts, and concluded that Latto wasn’t living full-time as a woman. “I think she has her own female identity and she is trying to push her ideas of what a woman is on other people,” says Latto of Bailey. “She feels that to be a woman you must fit into this mould and tick certain boxes. She has this old-fashioned view on how women should be.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Courtney Campbell performs as Whitney Houston in the Miss Transgender contest. Photograph: Jesse Edwards Thomas/BBC

The mainstream media has been going through what has been described as a bit of a “trans moment”. In the last couple of years, a handful of transgender people, though mainly transgender women such as reality star Caitlyn Jenner and the actor Laverne Cox, have made trans issues and lives more visible. Latto says she was wary of some aspects of the media that have treated transgender people as little more than a “modern-day freakshow”, but she says she wasn’t concerned about being part of this documentary. “I was very comfortable. I wanted to be seen as this woman who is extremely early with her transition. I feel like there aren’t many women or trans people in the media who are at my stage. Everybody sees a trans woman at the end of her journey – Caitlyn Jenner, Laverne Cox, [writer and campaigner] Janet Mock, they have all done their transition, they are at the end, they are the complete woman in everybody else’s eyes. There is nobody showing themselves during the transition. The documentary shows me as a very early-stage woman and it shows the issues I have, especially with my confidence.”

Latto, 23, works as a makeup artist and lives in Walkerburn, a small village in the Scottish Borders. She entered the competition because she thought it would “build my confidence. Also, I don’t know any other trans people – I’m like the only trans in the village – and I felt that entering this competition I could make good friends who had something in common with me, and I could learn from them during my transition.”

At the start, she was very nervous and self-conscious. “Most of the girls in the competition were further developed within their transition, and were probably more confident about who they were as a person. I felt like a 13-year-old girl who was starting to find herself.” But she won her heat and made it through to the final.

Even at that stage, she says, there were other contestants who felt she shouldn’t be in the competition, “because I was at an early stage [in her transition] and they felt that I hadn’t been through the struggles they had been through, that I wasn’t one of them. It felt like that I needed to tick all these boxes and go through these tests.” And when she won, the criticism started to escalate: “A lot of girls felt I wasn’t worthy to have this title.” In the film, Fay Purdham, another contestant, is shown sticking up for Latto. “It’s preposterous,” she says of the way Latto has been treated. “[Jai] is a great representative.”

“Rachael is entitled to her opinion but I never doubted that Jai was a woman,” says Sethi. She wanted to make the film because “it seemed like a way to meet women who were right at the beginning of their transition, and women who were further along. It was an opportunity to understand a bit more what that journey would be like, especially women like Jai who are asking themselves questions, how they want to be a woman and what’s important to them. And tapping into that bigger question of how to be a woman.”