Pageant Queen Was Told to Hide Her Intersex Condition. Then She Completely Shocked Everyone (Exclusive)

Jackie Blankenship started entering pageants around the age of 12, but it took her over a decade and a half to start competing as the truest version of herself.

She nabbed her biggest win at age 36, when she was crowned Mrs. America 2022. And as they called her name, Blankenship relished in the fact that no one could claim she didn’t deserve the title. No one could say she didn’t show up to the nationwide pageant as anything but herself. It was a surprising and unexpected win, but it was earned.

Because in the semi-finals, when the top six Mrs. America contestants individually answer a question on stage, Blankenship spoke with no holds barred. Despite some advice she’d received while training for the pageant, she didn’t sugarcoat her story and the platform it inspired.

“There were times when the people that I was preparing with were like, ‘I don’t know if you should say that. I don’t know if you should put it that way,'” Blankenship recalls to PEOPLE. “We were in the top six and I thought, ‘I cannot believe I got to this point.’ And then I talked about having balls.”

Blankenship has complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, one of over 40 variations of intersex conditions that prohibit her from responding to testosterone. She was born with no uterus or ovaries, but she had internal testes that produced estrogen.

Growing up, Blankenship didn’t know much about her body and how it differed from other women and girls. She knew she couldn’t conceive children, and she was told that eventually doctors would need to operate and remove something from her abdomen.

It’s not that her parents were ashamed about her condition; in fact, Blankenship has three aunts with intersex conditions, so the concept wasn’t entirely foreign to their family. Their tentative approach to the subject actually stemmed from conversations with doctors, Blankenship recalls, “They used a lot of terminology like, ‘Well, we can fix this.'”

Medical professionals made it clear that Blankenship, then just a child, could ultimately be “normal” if they followed a proper surgical protocol. After she hit puberty, they removed her internal testes and told her parents that Blankenship could undergo dilation therapy for her vaginal canal.

Per the doctors’ rhetoric, that combination of treatments would make it so “no one would know the difference. Just don’t tell anybody,” Blankenship recalls to PEOPLE of her doctors’ advice.

And her parents listened to them, because it seemed like Blankenship’s condition — which prevented Blankenship from being “normal” — might open her up to criticism and mistreatment from others. Her family was worried and protective, so they urged a young Blankenship not to speak openly about the topic.

Not that she even knew enough about it to bring it up publicly anyway, even if she wanted to. While she grew up knowing her body was different and had to be surgically “fixed,” Blankenship wasn’t told many essential details until she was about 18 years old. And even when her doctors explained pieces of the puzzle, her understanding was limited to the fact of her abnormality.

“When I was 18, that was when they first dropped the bomb on me: ‘You recognize you’re female, you have what looks like a vagina, but you don’t actually have a vaginal canal,'” she remembers. Working with so few anatomical details, she was left confused. The feeling only heightened as doctors asked invasive questions about whether or not she discussed the subject with her boyfriend at the time.

“They’d always really encourage me to not give full details,” says Blankenship. “It was a lot of triggering language that would be like, ‘Okay, you seem to think someone will have a problem with it.'”

Blankenship was diagnosed in 1989, and she didn’t exactly have the means to search complete androgen insensitivity syndrome on her own until she started college in the mid-2000s. By then, she had access to computers and the internet.

“It occurred to me one day, ‘I wonder what’ll happen if I look up complete androgen insensitivity syndrome?” Because I just had never really faced that,” she explains. Her search returned terms, concepts and medical jargon previously unfamiliar to the then-college student.

“I saw things like ‘XY chromosomes means male. Typically, these people are male, and they don’t respond to testosterone,'” says Blankenship nearly 20 years later. “My head was spinning.”

At that point in her life, Blankenship was pursuing her athletic talents. She enrolled at university on a cross-country and track scholarship. She ran competitively throughout her college career and continued for a fifth year as a redshirt student-athlete. She’d set her pageant aspirations to the side, but eventually, she felt the urge to get back on stage.

With one semester of school left, she started trying to discover those “more feminine” aspects of herself. She walked onto the dance team and got involved in her college’s theater program. In her mid-twenties, she entered the pageant world again, competing in the likes of the Miss Michigan USA and Miss Michigan Galaxy contests.

For the most part, she took home the honorary title of Miss Congeniality or left with no crown at all, but the lack of wins didn’t deter her at all. Once again, she was hooked on pageantry.

In 2013, Blankenship got married, making her eligible for the “Mrs.” divisions, and she started by entering Mrs. Michigan America in 2014. As is the case with most pageants, each contestant’s platform is an extremely important part of their participation, and at the time, Blankenship opted to advocate for infertility awareness.

She was confident talking about the subject, since she herself wasn’t able to conceive naturally. In 2014, Blankenship and her husband — who now share a daughter, 9-year-old Greenleigh — had just started discussing the possibility of getting an egg donor or finding a gestational carrier.

Blankenship competed on an infertility platform for two years, though she admits she didn’t feel very connected to it at all. Yes, she and her husband were going through the journey to welcome a child, but since Blankenship’s sister ended up carrying Greenleigh to term, Blankenship herself never felt like the fertility “patient.”

Plus, infertility wasn’t something she ever grappled with in the same way as other women her age.

“I knew from when I was itty bitty that I couldn’t have children. So I had accepted that,” she tells PEOPLE. “I don’t know a life where I even thought I could have children.”

Blankenship notes that about 50 percent of pageant judging is based on contestants’ interviews and platforms. Since she couldn’t fully relate to the “traumatic experience” of infertility for which she was advocating, the bulk of her participation felt like a lie.

That sense of fraudulence seeped into other areas of her life, beyond pageantry. She was working as a local television news reporter at the time, and the fact of her infertility became public, though she didn’t extrapolate beyond saying she was born without ovaries or a uterus.

“I would have couples and women reach out to me a lot and want to talk and say that they can’t have children, they’re really struggling. But I always felt this disconnect with them. I couldn’t really relate to them,” she tells PEOPLE.

“I had so much other stuff going on with my gender and my identity, and feeling like I had to keep this secret, that it just was hard for me to connect,” adds Blankenship. “I felt like I was reading a script.”

Something shifted in Blankenship when she became a mom. When Greenleigh arrived, “It almost changed my perspective. I stopped caring so much,” says the longtime pageant contestant. “I decided, ‘You know what? [Being intersex] is what makes me unique. This is what makes me me.'”

She also realized her condition is actually what drew her to pageants in the first place, even when she first started out as a preteen.

“I think that I knew there was something different about me. I think that subconsciously I wanted to be on the stage and wear the pretty clothes and do this feminine thing because of that,” she shares.

Blankenship made the switch: intersex advocacy became her pageant platform. She wanted to talk about it in competition circuits and focus on the surgeries being done on minors without their informed consent — the same type of “normalizing” operation she received before she knew any real details about her anatomy.

As honest and real as her new platform felt, the results weren’t immediate. She didn’t start winning crowns right off the bat, though she was urged to carry on anyway.

“The feedback I would get from actual judges was always really strong. Even when I didn’t win, I would get feedback like, ‘That was a really intense interview. I learned so much. I didn’t even know,'” says Blankenship. “They never had a negative thing to say.”

The less positive responses came from pageant officials and fellow competitors: “Organizations would find out about my platform, and then they would question me, like, ‘Well, we’ve had some women reach out that they don’t understand what your platform is and they’re confused. Because you have to be a biological female to compete in this pageant,'” Blankenship recalls.

It left her feeling uncomfortable around other contestants, she admits, “I’d be like, ‘Well, which one of you said that? Which one of you has a problem with me?'”

There was pushback on personal levels as well. Some of Blankenship’s friends would tell her they supported her and her platform, but they hesitated with worries that others may not understand it. But at that point, Blankenship was far past caring whether or not her platform was palatable to others.

She publicly came out to her community in 2017, when she wrote an article for a local women’s magazine.

“It was the first time I used that terminology, intersex, and understood, ‘I have XY chromosomes. I had testes in my abdomen that were removed,'” she says. “I got a lot of feedback on it, and people were really kind. I didn’t really have anyone say anything negative.”

In addition to using it as her pageant platform, she talked about being intersex on the radio morning show she was hosting at the time. She even aired a report on Intersex Awareness Day that received a runner-up award from the Michigan Association of Broadcasters.

In 2021, Blankenship decided to return to Mrs. Michigan America on her intersex awareness platform. She landed second place, just behind a friend of hers who nabbed the winning crown. When it came time for her pal to represent their state at the national competition, an injury prevented her from traveling to Las Vegas. Just two months before the pageant, Blankenship was tapped to compete for Mrs. America in her stead.

With so little prep time compared to the other contestants, she was less concerned with having the perfect campaign. She wore what she describes as “the most outlandish outfits” and the brightest colors possible, all in the interest of having fun and showing up as herself.

“I went in with this total mentality of, ‘Well, who cares?'” says Blankenship. “I didn’t even win the state, so I’m just going to go and tell my story.”

The win came as a complete shock, and at first, she understood it as a personal win. She’s been on those stages countless times, many times a runner-up up and many times overlooked. “For years, I was too much, I was too loud, my hair was too short,” the 2021 winner reflects. She’d been told her story “wasn’t appropriate” and told she should change the language.

When she was crowned in Las Vegas, it was her long-awaited victory. It only became something bigger for the broader intersex population when she embarked on her “reign” as Mrs. America. She toured around Michigan and neighboring states to talk about intersex awareness. She spoke about it at women’s conferences, universities and in front of some big-name corporations.

“That was when I realized, ‘This is actually a win for a whole community of people,'” she says.

In the spirit of that victory, Blankenship has continued advocating for intersex people on social media and beyond. She posts about it on TikTok, where she has over 183,000 followers, and on Instagram for her 12,500 fans. In July, she launched her podcast, The Unedited Body, to talk about her experience and address issues of healthcare, womanhood, medical trauma and more.

Throughout it all — from her pageant win to her rise to viral fame — Blankenship underscores the fact that her experience as an intersex individual isn’t universal. She recognizes the importance of her accomplishments while also acknowledging her privilege as someone who appears and presents as a woman.

“You see me and you’re like, ‘Well, she is a pretty girl, a pageant queen, and she’s intersex, so I feel good around intersex. I know what that means now.’ Not everyone who’s intersex looks like me, talks like me, identifies like me,” she tells PEOPLE. “And that’s okay too. They have the same trauma, the same problems, and the same fight for medical justices that I have.”

Blankenship continues, “The reality is there are 40 intersex conditions, and a person can’t control if their condition leaves them female but maybe looking masculine. Do they really deserve less autonomy and less rights and less compassion from us, because they don’t look like what you deem a female?”