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100+ Trans Men Signed Up For the Miss Italy Pageant After Trans Woman Were Banned
The pageant's organizer recently said contestants had to be "women from birth."
While some countries are pushing human rights forward, Italy has decided to take a step back in the area of trans rights.
The Miss Italy pageant has announced that it will not allow trans women to enter, and in response, over 100 trans men from the country have entered the pageant in protest.
Miss Italy’s organizer, Patrizia Mirigliani, announced the news on Radio Cusano earlier this month. Miss Italy’s current rules exclude trans women, and Mirigliani said that she is not going to update them to jump on the “glittery bandwagon of trans activism.”
“Lately, beauty contests have been trying to make the news by also using strategies that I think are a bit absurd,” Mirigliani said, referencing trans woman Rikkie Valerie Kollé’s recent victory in the Miss Netherlands pageant. She is the first trans woman to win the competition and will be the second trans woman to compete in the MIss Universe competition.
“Since it was born, my competition has foreseen in its regulation the clarification according to which one must be a woman from birth. Probably because, even then, it was foreseen that beauty could undergo modifications, or that women could undergo modifications, or that men could become women,” Mirigliani said, Il Primato Nazionale reported.
Kollé replied to the news in her Instagram stories over the weekend. “This is so sad,” she wrote, sharing a link to the news. “Instead of moving forward, it seems that we are only moving further back.”
She’s not the only trans person protesting the recent decision. Trans men in Italy have also taken up the fight.
Trans activist Federico Barbarossa is a trans man in Italy who is using the “biologically born a woman” rule to enter the Miss Italy pageant. And now, over a hundred others have joined him.
Barbarossa said he wanted to “trigger, through a joke, a reflection on the absurdity of some logics out of time and out of the world” and that “someone imagines us as three-headed monsters who could never aspire to win a beauty contest, because even the media representation often brings forward narratives that fetishize our bodies. With this campaign, we are giving visibility to the truth of trans people.”
Another trans man who signed up, Elia Bonci, also spoke to an Italian newspaper about his decision to enter.
“I took courage, used my deadname, and signed up for Miss Italy. Because fighting transphobia is intersectional and even though I’m not a trans woman, I’ve decided to fight for their rights,” he said.
“Miss Italy is not just a beauty contest, but it is part of the country’s cultural history,” he continued. “And excluding trans women automatically means excluding them from history. Pretend they don’t exist.”
Mey Rude is a journalist and cultural critic who has been covering queer news for a decade. The transgender, Latina lesbian lives in Los Angeles with her fiancée.
Mey Rude is a journalist and cultural critic who has been covering queer news for a decade. The transgender, Latina lesbian lives in Los Angeles with her fiancée.
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