Over 100 trans men, women who identify as men, have entered the Miss Italy pageant in protest against the competition banning trans women from entry.
Earlier this month, Miss Netherlands awarded the title to Rikki Valerie Kollé, a transgender, which then prompted the Miss Italy official organizer, Patrizia Mirigliani, to say that transgenders would not be allowed to compete in that country’s competition.
“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 emphasized that 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.
In response, transgender activist Federico Barbarossa, a woman who identifies as a man and who lives in the southern Italian town of Bari, told 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 then applied to the pageant using her female birth name to protest in solidarity with the trans women that would be denied entry. Per NBC News:
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