Rikkie Valerie Kollé is not beautiful. He’s not a woman, either. But he just won a women’s beauty pageant to become Miss Netherlands. Heather Mac Donald, for one, is not amused and describes the seriousness of the situation.

Once upon a time, progressives sneered at beauty pageants. Whether the Miss America or the Miss Universe contest, all such “meat markets” objectify women, we were told. They turn females into sex objects! Reinforce patriarchal stereotypes! Teach girls that being in a state of partial undress, rather than learning how to code, is the path to success!

For girls in the 1970s, getting hotheaded about such chauvinist-pig traditions was a rite of passage, providing nearly as much satisfaction as biting off a hapless male’s head for holding open a door or helping with overhead luggage. Males soon got over such atavistic instincts, liberating females to lug their suitcases up subway stairs on their own, as able-bodied males unconcernedly pass them by. But the beauty pageant would not die. Organizers responded to the feminist critique by accentuating the social-activism component of the competition, eliciting from the contestants ever more fervent recitations of their aspirations, say, to found organizations for battered women.

Leftists were not impressed. For them, the beauty pageant remained an object of derision. Until now. For much of last week, the mainstream media breathlessly covered the coronation of “Miss Netherlands,” as she continues on her teary journey toward an ultimate goal of being crowned Miss Universe. One might even hear Bert Parks crooning “There She Is” in the background. And the reason for this sudden interest in an obscure preliminary stage of the contest? Miss Netherlands is really a Mister. Suddenly, even the swimsuit competition has become a worthwhile endeavor in a female’s life, as long as that female is a biological male.

Mac Donald jokes that an old school feminist would chalk it up to being “just like a man” to dominate even women’s events. But she marvels that women are subserviently stepping aside while males “muscle females aside.” Then, to the specific event:

For the finals of the Miss Netherlands contest, Rikkie Valerie Kollé, né Rik, appeared in a cherry-red satin gown, slit all the way up the side to reveal the entirety of his long, gorgeous leg, predictably shod in strappy five-inch stiletto heels. The sleeveless, backless plunging dress was held up by the slenderest of spaghetti straps over Rikki’s suspiciously broad shoulders. Rikki’s long tresses were blow-dried into wavy smoothness, his foundation and blush exquisitely modelled to create the illusion of flawless skin. In short, the very image of Las Vegas glamour.

We’ll spare you, but Mac Donald describes some of Rikki’s Instagram photos, before noting that he’s not the first male contestant in a female beauty pageant. She continues:

The owner of the Miss Universe pageant, Anne Jakapong Jakrajutatip, celebrated Rikki’s win by stating that the pageant exists to “celebrate women.” But what, exactly, are we celebrating if a man can become a woman by adopting stereotypes about womanhood that feed the multibillion-dollar cosmetics and plastic surgery industries? “Ms.” Jakrajutatip will not be much help in answering — because, by some remarkable coincidence, she is a male herself, reborn as a trans female.

Don’t miss the biggest points, which Mac Donald graphically lays out:

Ironically, trans females undermine the very premises of the theory that gave rise to this social mania: that traditional gender identities are an artificial construction designed to subjugate women. Trans females gravitate ineluctably toward the millennia-long assumption that to be female means, in significant part, to invite the male gaze. The female traits that traditionally have attracted that male gaze signaled fitness for mating. But the trans female’s beauty is a sterile one. Absent some God-like accentuation of surgical capacities, the trans female will remain barren, no matter how many times his violently excavated vagina is dilated and recut. More like Narcissus than Venus, the trans female is a dead end.

She adds, “The trans female also undermines feminist politics,” while pointing to Democrats’ attempted revival of “the defunct Equal Rights Amendment.” Why is that battle necessary if “females could simply all declare themselves male and escape the alleged oppression without protection from the courts”? Mac Donald concludes:

Progressives overlook the contradictions posed to their creeds by the trans mania because they now have a higher agenda: delivering the coup de grâce to the traditional family and rendering as many young people of European descent as possible uninterested in, and incapable of, reproducing. Rikkie Valerie Kollé is the comely face of Western self-cancellation.

Read the whole thing here.