Santa Susanna crowns a 29-year-old Nigerian model as Miss Star International 2023

The mayor intervenes at the end of the transgender beauty contest to claim the municipality as a space of freedom and to affirm that no one has to give up their way of being, nor their feelings

Santa Susanna has hosted a new edition of the Miss Star International 2023 beauty contest, dedicated to the transgender community. This year’s winner was a 29-year-old Nigerian model, Veso Golden Oke, who prevailed over contestants from Australia and Ecuador.

Veso Golden was, in 2019, the first trans woman who was allowed to compete openly in a beauty pageant in Africa. She is from Nigeria, but at the age of 20 she had to leave to live in neighboring Ghana, where her mother is from, due to the persecution and mistreatment of the trans and LGTBI community in Nigeria.

In this edition of the Miss Star International 2023 contest, representatives from 23 states were present in Santa Susanna.

A social claim

In the videos that the contestants make public before the verdict, they all ask to be able to live naturally with their condition, they ask not to be discriminated against and not to have to suffer the misunderstanding of a part of society.

Precisely, in his speech the mayor, Joan Campolier, assured that the Miss Star International contest is an event that goes far beyond a beauty contest. It is an opportunity to demand “freedom, equality and respect” for a cause that only begs to be accepted. Campolier praised the struggle of a group of people who “have concerns, who love, who form families, who are trained to have a professional future, like anyone else”. And he asked them not to slack off, to “do with their lives what they want as long as they respect that their freedom ends where the freedom of others begins”. He ended his speech by saying to the group: “love as you wish and whomever you wish. And don’t let anyone tell you how to love.”