Beauty contest for transgenders gets flagged for hosting without license

The pageant concluded on Saturday night at a film studio in District 12 and was live-streamed.

On Sunday morning a department official said: "This contest was not licensed by the authorities. The department will coordinate with other agencies to probe and handle it in accordance with the law."

Its organizer, a company owned by Nguyen Huong Giang (who won the 2018 Miss International Queen in Thailand), said it would work with authorities.

The beauty pageant for transgender people was organized by the company at the start of this year with seven episodes in the format of a reality TV show, and broadcast on YouTube.

In February, Giang planned to hold an event to announce the top 20 contestants, but it was canceled. According to the Department of Information and Communications of HCMC, the organizer has applied for a license to hold the event, but the department found that they didn’t submit enough documents according to procedures so the event was requested to stop.

This is the third edition of Miss International Queen Vietnam, a contest founded by Huong Giang in 2018. The winner of this year, 23-year-old Nguyen Ha Diu Thao will get to compete at Miss International Queen pageant held in Thailand in June.