To advance in competition, Miss North Florida 2025, Kayleigh Bush, was told to sign a contract that forced her to compete against men. She refused.
"Miss" America and "Miss" Florida advertise as women-only competitions, which is misleading and may violate FL law. This is wrong! pic.twitter.com/UJoAzyUOl1
— Attorney General James Uthmeier (@AGJamesUthmeier) April 10, 2026
The Florida AG sent a letter to the Miss America organization objecting to its policies that appeared to allow contestants who had "fully completed sex reassignment surgery via vaginoplasty (from male to female) with supporting medical documentation and records." (The Miss America organization claims this was intended all along to cover only women born with XX chromosomes but with an intersex condition, who had gotten the condition surgically altered; it has since changed the policy language to so indicate.)
Now beauty pageants, like theatrical productions, have a First Amendment right to choose who competes in them, including based on sex, gender identity, marital status (Miss), citizenship status (America), age, race or ethnicity (as is the case with some such competitions, though not Miss America itself), and more. Green v. Miss United States of America (9th Cir. 2022) so recognized, in upholding a pageant's requirement that participants be "natural born females":
As with theater, cinema, or the Super Bowl halftime show, beauty pageants combine speech with live performances such as music and dancing to express a message. And while the content of that message varies from pageant to pageant, it is commonly understood that beauty pageants are generally designed to express the "ideal vision of American womanhood." In doing so, pageants "provide communities with the opportunity to articulate the norms of appropriate femininity both for themselves and for spectators alike."
Equally important to this case is understanding the method by which the Pageant expresses its view of womanhood. Given a pageant's competitive and performative structure, it is clear that who competes and succeeds in a pageant is how the pageant speaks. Put differently, the Pageant's message cannot be divorced from the Pageant's selection and evaluation of contestants. This interdependent dynamic between medium and message is well-established and well-protected in our caselaw….