When transgender woman Rikkie Valerie Kolle made history last month being crowned Miss Netherlands, organisers of an unaffiliated Italian competition decided to introduce new rules preventing transgender women from entering.
The Miss Italy organisers said entrants in the competition must have been assigned female at birth to take part.
Annoyed at the ruling, Italian transgender man Federico Barbarossa decided to take a stand.
“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,’” he recently told NBC News in America. But when He put in an application using his dead name, the name he had before he transitioned gender, it was accepted.
After he shared his successful application online, it inspired other members of the local transgender community to put in applications too. He now estimates around 100 transgender men have entered the competition.
Barbarossa said they while he does not expect to make it to the next stage of the competition, he was just pleased that the pageant organisers would now have the time-consuming task of scrutinising every application.
“They really have to go through every single application.” he said.
Transgender women have been able to enter the Miss Universe competition since 2012, the rule introduced when the competition was owned by former US President Donald Trump. In2022 the global competition was bought by Thai businesswoman Anne Jakkapong Jakrajutatip, who is herself transgender.
OIP Staff
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