Trans men enter Miss Italy to protest pageant’s ban on trans women

Transgender men are protesting Miss Italy’s ban on trans women competing by entering the pageant themselves.

The protest comes after comments made by Miss Italy’s official patron Patrizia Mirigliani earlier this month confirming that the pageant would not update its rules banning transgender women.

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“Lately, beauty pageants have been trying to make headlines by also using strategies that I think are a bit absurd,” Mirigliani reportedly told Italy’s Radio Cusano, responding to a question about trans model Rikkie Valerie Kollé’s trailblazing Miss Netherlands win on July 8.

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Mirigliani added that Miss Italy would only allow “women from birth” to compete and that the pageant would not be jumping on the “glittery bandwagon of trans activism.”

In response, trans men across Italy have applied to compete in Miss Italy. According to Gay Community News, over 100 trans men have entered so far. Guglielmo Giannotta, a digital creator and president of Italian nonprofit ACET Associazione Transgenere, has been documenting the many trans men who have applied to compete in Miss Italy via his Instagram stories.

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The campaign was reportedly launched by trans activist Federico Barbarossa. “When I heard about the absurd regulation, it came spontaneously to me,” he told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. “I was assigned to the female gender at birth, but I’ve always felt like a boy.”

“We hope that the gesture will arouse the media clamor needed to put these issues back at the center and that many other ‘women at birth’ register en masse for the competition to make fun of these positions,” Barbarossa continued. “They would reject me because I’m a boy and I look like a boy, while if a trans girl registers, she is rejected because she is not considered a woman. What’s the point, then?”

Fellow trans activist Elia Bonci also applied to enter the pageant. “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 reportedly told La Repubblica. “Miss Italy is not just a beauty contest, but it is part of the country’s cultural history. And excluding trans women automatically means excluding them from history. Pretend they don’t exist.”

In an Instagram post, Bonci noted that the pageant’s rule banning trans women “is somehow rather pleasantly inclusive for trans men.”

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A post shared by Elia Bonci 🏳️‍⚧️| scrittore🖋 (@elia.lien)

“In the regulation, it says that the participants must be ‘female from birth,’” he wrote in the post’s caption. “This statement, unfortunately, excludes trans women. But not being clear (and obviously being totally confused between birth-based sex, gender identity, and everything transgender related) it still allows trans men… to sign up.”

He went on to encourage “all trans kids who feel it to submit their candidacy” and added that he couldn’t wait to see the faces of the Miss Italy judges when confronted with so many handsome men.