Andrey Nagorny, 20-year-old man from Russia’s Sakhalin Oblast region, recently caused an uproar when it was revealed that he won a women’s lingerie photo contest organized by a popular store chain.

Via Oddity Central:

Nagorny heard of the online photo contest through his girlfriend. Aware of his feminine features, they decided to take a few photos of Andrey wearing some sexy women’s lingerie and enter them into the contest, just for fun. Andrey’s girlfriend, whose name has not been made public, fixed his hair and did his makeup before asking a talented photographer to snap some rather professional-looking photos of him and submitting them to the contest organizer online. They expected to get a good laugh out of the whole thing, but what they didn’t expect was for Andrey to be declared the winner.

Ah, but he was. He was awarded the title of “Miss Avocado” (?!) and scheduled for a professional photo shoot to celebrate his win. When he arrived, that’s when the store managers learned that he was actually a man.

Afraid of how the public – particularly their customers – would react to a man being celebrated for wearing women’s lingerie, they decided to disqualify him and hand the title over to the first runner up.

“The boy looks very similar to a girl, and since anyone could enter our contest, he chose to participate as well. We got his photos, and in the end the jury chose him as the winner, he was selected,” Zheanna Stolpovskaya, manager of the lingerie store chain that organized the photo contest, told 360TV. “For the final photo shoot, we chose three girls, he didn’t participate, because the photos will be available for everyone to see. Obviously, we couldn’t predict how the general public and our buyers would react to them.”

The public’s reaction, when the story came out in the press, wasn’t what they thought it would be.

“Idiots! Now he can easily sue them for gender discrimination. And you thought that only women are discriminated against?” one person wrote on Russian social media.

“They are so full of s*hit! Why didn’t they announce gender requirements from the very start? Or give the first prize to the owner of the lingerie store chain?” another commented.

Not what you might expect, given the current political climate in Russia. Unfortunately, Andrey Nagorny apparently didn’t even win a consolation prize, but he says that he’s not disappointed at all, because he never expected to win in the first place. He does, however, have a multitude of new fans and online fame, which is consolation enough.

So. Sliiiight victory in Russia. A bit of progress.

For more pics of Andrey Nagorny, check out his Instagram account.