Pageant Winner Refuses Miss America Contract for Redefining “Female”

Ultimately, the contract requires female beauty candidates to agree to compete against biological males – who have been subjected to medical mutilation as minor boys – and agree that these mutilated males are “female.”

When presented with the contract, Bush requested removal of the contract’s definitional language to keep from violating her religious beliefs and over concern for the safety of minor boys. After the Miss Florida Scholarship Program, Inc., and the Miss America Organization (MAO) refused and denied her appeals, Liberty Counsel sent a demand letter on her behalf requesting they reconsider the contract language and restore Bush’s title so she can compete in the Miss Florida Competition scheduled for June 25-28, 2025.

The contract language states that applicants must be “female,” and that “female” means:

“[A]n individual who has fully completed Sex Reassignment Surgery [sic] via Vaginoplasty (from male to female) [sic] with supporting medical documentation and records. Supporting medical documentation must be in the form of the certification attached, signed by the surgeon who performed the surgery and notarized, along with a copy of board certification and a current medical license. No alternative gender affirming [sic] surgery will suffice as acceptable in place of a Vaginoplasty [sic].”

In the letter, Liberty Counsel explained that Bush objects to the definition based on her “religious, scientific, political and moral beliefs that sex is immutable” and that “individuals are born and remain either male or female.”

“[T]he word ‘female’ indeed ‘means a born female’ and that it is offensive to female dignity to require females to compete against males claiming to be the opposite sex,” reads the letter. Since the eligibility age for certain pageants is 14-18, Bush’s “strongest objection” is to how the additional definition of “female” also “incentivizes and promotes grievous harm to the health and safety of minor boys.”

However, both organizations have twice refused Liberty Counsel’s request to revise the contract.

Liberty Counsel noted Bush first entered into an oral agreement after winning her title where there had been no mention or public-facing materials put forth by the organizations indicating they subscribed to this “false” definition of “female.”

A reasonable Miss North Florida candidate, Liberty Counsel stated, would not expect to be presented with an overtly false definition of “female” after otherwise performing all other conditions to the oral agreement. While fulfilling her terms of the agreement, under the “truthful, natural, normal and usual definition of ‘female’ that most people understand, it was then the organizations presented Bush with an “un-bargained-for and novel” contract involving castrated males.

“Thus, Miss Florida, Inc. is in apparent breach of its oral agreement with [Bush], over terms that are void under Florida law and public policy,” wrote Liberty Counsel.

As the letter states, the MAO contract contradicts Florida’s legal definition of “sex” which classifies people as “either male or female” based on the human body’s “specific reproductive role,” including “sex chromosomes, naturally occurring sex hormones, and internal and external genitalia present at birth.” Moreover, the contract’s “female” definition also ignores current, enforceable Florida law prohibiting sterilization and castration of minors under the guise of “sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures.”

“A contract which violates a provision of the Florida Constitution or a Florida statute is void and illegal, and will not be enforced in Florida courts,” wrote Liberty Counsel.

In April 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a scathing memorandum to combat the “barbaric practice” of chemically castrating and surgically mutilating children. The memo aligns under President Donald Trump’s January executive order that withdraws all federal funding for puberty blockers, hormones, or irreversible mutilating surgeries for minors, and directs rigorous enforcement of all laws to protect children from these destructive and life-altering procedures.

According to AG Bondi, gender ideology is just “junk science” that steers children to “process adolescent stress and confusion” as “mistaken identity,” and that the only solution is permanent and life-altering chemical and surgical interventions. It is an “unchecked ideological attack on America’s children,” she wrote.

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “We commend Kayleigh Bush for taking a stand and refusing to sign the Miss America Organization’s contract that is infused with false gender ideology. A contract that defines ‘female’ to include boys 14-18 who have had medically castrated is an abandonment of reality and an endorsement of harming children. Kayleigh Bush should have her crown restored and these types of reprehensible contracts must be stopped.”