Miss USA gets first transgender entry

Kataluna Enriquez, 28, was named Miss Nevada USA on the anniversary of the Stonewall police raid in New York.

Kataluna Enriquez Miss Nevada 2021. Picture: Miss Silver State USA

A beauty queen from Nevada will become the first openly transgender woman to compete in the Miss USA pageant in a move hailed as a breakthrough.

Kataluna Enriquez, 28, was named Miss Nevada USA on the anniversary of the Stonewall police raid in New York, which prompted a civil rights movement by gay and transgender activists more than 50 years ago. “My win is our win,” she posted on Instagram. “We just made history.”

The pageant, run by the Miss Universe Organisation, once owned by Donald Trump, did not allow transgender contestants until 2012.

A rival pageant, Miss United States, still bars transgender women. In March it won a discrimination suit brought by Anita Noelle Green. Judge Michael Mosman accepted the pageant’s argument that the inclusion of Green “would compel it to express a message with which it disagrees”, infringing its rights to free speech.

Enriquez began competing in pageants in 2015 after she underwent surgery. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she told The Washington Post. “I didn’t have a team. I didn’t know what to wear. I didn’t have the money.” Enriquez, a healthcare administrator, told the KVUU television station: “I didn’t have the easiest journey in my life. I struggled with physical and sexual abuse. I struggled with mental health.”

She sewed her own gowns for the Miss Nevada contest, incorporating the colours of a transgender pride flag.

“I knew that I had worked really hard and I had my one shot at making history,” Enriquez, a Filipina-American, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “I told the judges that as a transgender woman of colour and a survivor of abuse, I am everything that is underrepresented in this country.”

As victor, she will compete in the Miss USA contest in November, against beauty queens from all 50 states.

The Times