When you’re a contestant in a beauty pageant, you have to bring confidence and, obviously, beauty. But it’s also a competition, and few pageants are as contemplative as being crowned Miss America. However, this competition is limited to women, but where does that leave trans women? When one Miss America contestant argued trans woman had no place there, a Florida influencer thought differently. And she made it known that the woman was last place in her heart.
TikToker Day (TikTok/Dolloftheday) starts off her video with a clip of an interview from TMZ, featuring Miss America contestant Kayleigh Bush. In the interview, Kayleigh shares how she wasn’t going to sign the contract to win the title of Miss North Florida. “Cause I couldn’t agree that a little boy could mutilate his body and become a woman,” Kayleigh says. She’s referring to Miss America’s change in policy, which states trans women can’t compete unless they’ve had reassignment surgery.
Day calls this out for what it is: hogwash. “The collective issue that people have with trans people participating in pageantry is the funniest thing to me, because let them tell in,” Day says. She then argues it doesn’t matter what surgery a trans person has had, because conservatives will still say they “look like men” and are “ugly.”
Essentially, Kayleigh refused to sign her contract over the “potential” of competing with a trans woman for Miss America. First, Day states a few statistics on reassignment surgery—according to PMC, only 20% of trans women have had the operation done. That’s 20% of the estimated 1% of the U.S. population being trans, by the way. As Day puts it, the odds are “slim to none” of Kayleigh competing with a trans woman, anyway.
Unfortunately, the statistics are neither here nor there. It’s just to be “performative,” Day says, and a way to simply “legislate away Casper the friendly ghost.” She pushes harder against the narrative that it’s a question of beauty standards, and that you’d be the “fool” to think not a single Miss America contestant had some kind of surgery done: “The amount of botched nose jobs that I’ve seen on that stage is insurmountable,” Day says.
Why don’t trans people create their own pageant? Day has an answer for that, too: it’s just transphobia. “Let’s not act like there isn’t a huge subset of society that has the ick for transness,” Day says, and that “ick” is what drives sponsors and media attention away.
Surprisingly, the comment section of Day’s TikTok video was mostly clear of transphobia, though one nasty comment did slip by. Otherwise, it was full of support and sassy quips.
Another one, a mother, took this as an opportunity to share how much she loves her trans daughter. “Um my daughter is beautiful and she could definitely win,” they said, and posted an image of their daughter killing it in high heels and a slim dress.
“Trying to get the Riley Gaines grift going,” remarked one commenter. Riley Gaines also had her name plastered on numerous headlines complaining and campaigning against trans people in sports. She couldn’t cut it anymore as an athlete, so now it’s onto anti-trans ‘activism.’
