Miss Italy Pageant Bans Transgender Contestants After Netherlands Crowns First Trans Winner

What a difference a country makes.

The Miss Italy beauty pageant has definitively announced a ban on all transgender contestants — mere weeks after the Miss Netherlands contest crowned its first trans winner.

The Italian pageant has declared that all competitors must be female "from birth."

Oddly, the pageant's representative insisted that operation officials have known from the beginning of the existence of the contest — 1939 — that at some point gender issues would have to be clarified.

"Since it was born, my competition has foreseen in its regulation the clarification according to which one must be a woman from birth," pageant "patron" Patrizia Mirigliani said in an interview with Radio Cusano reported by Newsweek. 

"Even then, it was foreseen that beauty could undergo modifications, or that women could undergo modifications, or that men could become women," she added.

Mirigliani called efforts to increase beauty pageants' "inclusivity" a "bit absurd" in an interview with Evie magazine, according to Fox News.

On the very other hand, the Dutch earlier this month crowned their first trans-identifying winner of the Miss Netherlands pageant: Rikkie Valerie Kolle.

It was not, however, entirely smooth sailing. She was met with a shocking deluge of hate, she told the press.

"I thought we were really accepting . . . in the Netherlands, but the hate comments show the other side of our society. I hope that's a wake-up call," Kolle told Reuters.