Over 100 transgender men, women who identify as men, have entered the Miss Italy pageant in protest against the competition banning trans women from entering.
Earlier this month, a transgender beauty queen contestant crowned Miss Universe Netherlands 2023 at the AFAS Theater.
Weeks later, the Miss Italy pageant banned transgender contestants, declaring anyone competing “must be a woman from birth.”
“Lately, beauty contests have been trying to make the news using strategies that I think are a bit absurd,” Mirigliani told an Italian radio station.
Mirigliani said such beauty pageants have been exclusively female in the past.
“Probably because, even then, it was foreseen that beauty could undergo modifications, or that women could undergo modifications, or that men could become women,” she said.
Transgender activist Federico Barbarossa, a woman who identifies as a man, responded by telling NBC News that she felt “kind of amused by it, because I was like, ‘Yeah, well, I was assigned female at birth, but they would reject me because I look like a boy, and they would consider me as a boy.'”
Barbarossa applied to the Italy pageant using her female birth name to protest the trans ban.
Barbarossa shared a screenshot of an email he received confirming his registration on Instagram and encouraged other trans men to do the same.
The campaign quickly went viral, and Barbarossa now estimated over 100 trans men have entered the pageant so far.
He said some told him they have even been called to selections.
Barbarossa was happy that Miss Italy organizers “really have to go through every single application,” hoping the protest would “maybe lead them to think better next time.”
“I like to think I’m a little part of Italy’s progress in this sense,” Barbarossa said.
“They would never think that a trans person might even aspire to win a beauty pageant because we’re seen as this kind of, like, three-headed monster, and I think a part of it is that so many people have never seen trans women or trans men or trans people in general,” Barbarossa added.
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