When Miss France Was Almost Mister

Mookie Spitz rewinds to 2001, when French beauty queen Elodie Gossuin was crowned Miss France—and almost immediately became the subject of a tabloid-fueled smear suggesting she was transgender. What started as a rumor spun by the New York Daily News spiraled into a cultural flashpoint, one that exposed deep veins of transphobia, media sensationalism, and societal discomfort with identity long before “woke” was even part of the lexicon.

Mookie revisits his own op-ed from the time, which called out the hypocrisy not just in the mainstream press but within segments of the LGBTQ community itself. Two decades later, his words feel eerily prophetic. The scandal surrounding Gossuin hinted at the coming storm: a world where gender identity would become one of the most explosive battlefields in culture wars, where political factions would harden into opposing camps, and where “identity” itself would be weaponized—by both progressives and reactionaries.

This episode unpacks how Donald Trump’s casual transphobia during the Miss Universe era was a prelude to the full-throttle culture war politics he would later embody as president. It traces how beauty pageants, gender verification tests, and society’s obsession with “what’s real” versus “what’s allowed” planted the seeds for today’s polarized landscape.

Mookie explores how the Gossuin incident forecast the escalation of debates over who gets to define gender, who polices identity, and how fear of the “other” has been manipulated to stoke division. Along the way, he highlights how the lines between private choice, public spectacle, and political weaponry have blurred, leaving us in a world where every personal truth is up for public combat.

This is not just a story about a beauty queen—it’s a story about how the early 2000s quietly built the stage for the gender wars, woke backlash, and political polarization of the next twenty years. Tune in and follow the yellow brick road from a French runway to today’s fractured and increasingly polarizing headlines.

Blog Post with Original Op-Ed