Make Miss Universe Pageant All-Female Again

COMMENTARY Gender

Make Miss Universe Pageant All-Female Again

Nov 20, 2023 3 min read
COMMENTARY BY

Copy Editor, The Daily Signal

Peter serves as Copy Editor for The Daily Signal.
The transgender “Miss” Portugal Marina Machete participates during the 72nd Miss Universe Competition on November 18, 2023 in San Salvador, El Salvador. Hector Vivas / Getty Images

Key Takeaways

How humiliating and disheartening must it be for a Miss Universe pageant contestant to lose to a “woman” with a penis and testicles?

The CEO of the company that now owns and operates the Miss Universe pageant is Anne Jakapong Jakrajutatip, a Thai man who himself insists he’s a woman.

Ten other countries have withdrawn from this year’s pageant, though it’s unknown whether any of them did so to protest the participation of the faux females.

How humiliating and disheartening must it be for a Miss Universe pageant contestant to lose to a “woman” with a penis and testicles?

That, regrettably, is not a hypothetical question. That’s exactly what happened to real young women earlier this year in preliminary pageants in two European nations, Portugal and the Netherlands.

On Saturday night, those countries will be represented by a pair of transgender faux females at the 72nd annual Miss Universe pageant.

To borrow a vintage 55-year-old advertising line from Virginia Slims cigarettes, “You’ve come a long way, Baby.” Just not in the way Phillip Morris envisioned it in 1968.
 
And there may be yet more humiliation and heartbreak ahead for the XX-chromosomed real women participating in the pageant this weekend. Don’t discount the possibility that either “Miss” Portugal, Marina Machete, or “Miss” Netherlands, Rikkie Valerie Kolle, could walk away with the sash and tiara this weekend in El Salvador.

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That’s because the CEO of the company that now owns and operates the Miss Universe pageant, JKN Global Group, is Anne Jakapong Jakrajutatip, a Thai man who himself insists he’s a woman, biology to the contrary notwithstanding.
 
His modus operandi for the pageant appears to be “if it ain’t broke, break it.” 

“Trans women are women, full stop,” the Miss Universe Organization declared after Machete won the Portuguese crown. (“Full stop”? Really? At the risk of a double entendre here, they … umm … forgot the “period.” Or maybe the omission was intentional.)

Last November, shortly after acquiring the pageant, Jakrajutatip vowed to the Bangkok Post newspaper: “We will adopt a new concept, ‘One universe,’ in which opportunities to participate in the competition will be given also to trans women and married women, and fairness in the contest judging will be ensured.” (emphasis added)

And we all know how the unhinged Left spells “fairness”: D-E-I, as in “diversity, equity and inclusion.” 

“This will be the first beauty contest with real gender equality and inclusion,” Jakrajutatip averred. 

Not quite. “Miss” Portugal and “Miss” Netherlands aren’t the first transgender “women” to compete for the Miss Universe crown. In 2018, Angela Ponce, “Miss Spain,” beat them to it, but finished out of the Top 10 finalists.

The Portuguese and Dutch contestants will be competing against 90 real women from around the world, including, for the first time, a contestant from Pakistan.

Ten other countries have withdrawn from this year’s pageant, though it’s unknown whether any of them did so to protest the participation of the faux females.

Italy did the next best thing: It barred transgender “women” from its Miss Universe competition, stipulating that its contestants “must be a woman from birth.” (Miss Italy is not affiliated with the Miss Universe Organization, however, and the Miss Italy Universe pageant is a separate contest, according to CNN.)

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Even if the Miss Universe pageant weren’t owned by a transgender person, it wouldn’t be entirely surprising that biological men have been allowed into the competition, given that so many other endeavors heretofore reserved exclusively for real women have been invaded by these intersex interlopers, most notably high school and collegiate athletics. 

So has the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and earlier this month, Glamour magazine named as one of its seven “women of the year” a transgender model, whom one critic ridiculed on Glamour’s Instagram page as “a man in a dress.”

What’s just as disconcerting is the deafening silence of liberal “cisgender” women who purport to champion women’s rights but who won’t stand up for the real girls and women being cheated out of athletic awards and scholarships—or, in this case, pageant titles.

As recently as 2015, the Miss Universe pageant was co-owned by Donald Trump, who, for the past couple of years, has spoken out forcefully against allowing faux females to interlope in girls’ and women’s sports. 

Maybe the once-and-(perhaps)-future president should buy the pageant back and make the Miss Universe pageant great again. Or at least make it all-XX chromosomes again.

This piece originally appeared in The Washington Times on November 17, 2023