Precisely my point. BTW, you might have mentioned that your experience was not recent (the FL is closed in DFW for many months now). If your CX flight had been for a different day (say after midnight) you would not have been admitted by AA, despite having an F ticket on an international itinerary. This is a very annoying feature of AA (they enforce same day travel to mean midnight, and not a minute later). Of course it doesn't matter if Emerald (rather ironic that this is worth more than class of service!).