The Judges Must Have Forgotten to Check Her Nether Regions....

[Joe Guy]

[Scooter]

Miss Portugal was also trans this year, so there were two trans Miss Universe contestants. The Miss Universe organization has allowed trans contestants in its national pageants for some time now.

Surely no one is going to suggest (as they allege in sporting events) that being assigned male at birth gives them some sort of unfair advantage here.

[Scooter]

[BoSoxGal]

I’m so disgusted by beauty pageants that I could not care less what happens in them, and I certainly have no issue with trans women degrading themselves by participating in the cattle call if that is what they truly wish to do. I’m sure many of the women participating who were born women are as surgically altered as the trans women are so no, no unfair disadvantages or advantages happening there.

I remain deeply concerned by the participation of trans women in women’s sports - there IS an unfair advantage, the science supports that and I do believe it is an attack on women’s rights in the sporting realm which have barely begun to take hold in my lifetime.

I recently watched the very good film Misbehaviour on Kanopy - it’s about the feminist protests that took place at the Miss World pageant in 1970, which was held 3 days before I was born. The protests at the televised event brought huge attention to the women’s movement and of course the 70s were all about the ERA movement, women gaining freedom to credit and housing without need of a father or husband’s permission, women gaining access to divorce without the requirement to prove abuse or infidelity, women becoming a force to be reckoned with in universities, professions and the blue collar workforce as well.

The backlash has been growing since the 80s and the current climate of attacking women’s rights to basic lifesaving healthcare and forcing birth upon them is so heart sickening it takes one’s breath away if one is a woman or man who cares. Today I saw on the news that recent polling of young people revealed that young women see the gains of feminism as largely positive, but young men see them as largely negative. In a climate where young people typically skew much more progressive on social issues than older people do, it is heartbreaking to realize that the young women in our society will probably be relitigating the same battles that my great grandmother and grandmother and mother’s generation already fought- and mine too.

https://amp.theguardian.com/society/202 ... t-feminism

And then people wonder why I don’t have a very high opinion of most of the males of the species.

[Joe Guy]

I was going to ask this question:

How are Miss Universe winners decided?

Then I looked it up and found this:

In selecting a Miss Universe, we ask our selection committee, typically comprised of accomplished business leaders, philanthropists and public figures, to look for a young woman who is comfortable in her own skin; someone who is authentic, empathetic and determined to make her mark in the world.

Huh?

So, a woman who has had plastic surgery or transgender surgery can be judged to be comfortable in her own skin?


Personally, I prefer the classic style beauty queen who feels comfortable in her own void.....

[Burning Petard]

Forgive me Joe, for my ignorance, but I thought all the medical procedures, surgery, chemicals, psychotherapy was intended to result in that very condition, that the person could then be comfortable in he/her/their skin.

snailgate.

[Joe Guy]

Forgive me Joe, for my ignorance, but I thought all the medical procedures, surgery, chemicals, psychotherapy was intended to result in that very condition, that the person could then be comfortable in he/her/their skin.

Good point.

But what about the part where they're looking for a contestant who is authentic .

[Econoline]

Sometimes it takes years and years and thousands of dollars to achieve authenticity.

[Joe Guy]

Sometimes it takes years and years and thousands of dollars to achieve authenticity.

Reminds me of a song....

and she's buying a stairway.... to authenticity...

[Bicycle Bill]

Surely no one is going to suggest (as they allege in sporting events) that being assigned male at birth gives them some sort of unfair advantage here.

No one is 'assigned' male or female at birth — a baby is born either one or the other.   'Assigned' makes it sound like someone pulls a slip out of a fishbowl to see what they're gonna be.
It's only when these infants grow up (sort of) and take it into their so-called brains that they're something other than what God or Mother Nature made them that we start to run into those kinds of problems.

-"BB"-

[MajGenl.Meade]

Who cares?

What's a real disadvantage is when football teams in the FA Cup play at non-Premier league grounds. Then there's no VAR. Bad/marginal refereeing decisions (or non-decisions) cannot be corrected.

[Burning Petard]

BB, your faith in a binary system is remarkable. Have you no acquaintance or friend who has spent a decade or so working in a maternity/delivery room?

It is assigned. After a cursory (the technical term of art is 'gross examination') look between the legs of the newborn, it is assigned. Perhaps after a few artful snips or slices and stitches. Even the XY or XX gene is not the only reality. They may be 'rare' but with the total newborns on the planet, rare does not result in a small number. Well described in the scientific literature are also XXY, XYY, X only, and XXYY

snailgate.

[BoSoxGal]

And over here we have a nasty dose of transphobia - just the Plan B forum, keeping it real!

[Bicycle Bill]

BB, your faith in a binary system is remarkable. Have you no acquaintance or friend who has spent a decade or so working in a maternity/delivery room?

To be honest, no.  And I do ackowledge that mistakes can be made from time to time ... but those can be changed.  Shit, we've got instant replay for football and baseball games, and photo-finish cameras for just about any type of racing you'd care to name, from NAStyCAR to the Tour de France to horse racing to (for all I know), baitfish swimming down an array of parallel troughs in an event known as 'minnow racing'.

Even the XY or XX gene is not the only reality. They may be 'rare' but with the total newborns on the planet, rare does not result in a small number. Well described in the scientific literature are also XXY, XYY, X only, and XXYY.
snailgate.

My answer to that is that as you said, they are rare – just like people who are pure albino, or people with polydactyly, or persons with supernumary nipples, or people who have pointed 'elf' or 'Spock' ears (without resorting to cosmetic surgery).  Heck, I even saw an article many years ago that documented a person whose rectum somehow forked so that their posterior showed two anuses about an inch apart, both of which performed as nature intended.  And that's the same way I feel about those examples of those people whose sexual chromosomes may differ from the default 'XX' or "XY' configuration — a minuscule percentage (not a concrete number) of the overall population that reflects an oddity, a mutation, or a rarity.

So that's why I have such a firm belief in a binary system when it comes to gender.

-"BB"-

[Bicycle Bill]

And over here we have a nasty dose of transphobia - just the Plan B forum, keeping it real!

I assume you are yet again referring to me, as you seem to be willing to find fault with just about everything I say or do.

No, it's not 'transphobia' — it's merely a decision not to blindly swallow a lot of the balderdash that is being touted these days as 'fact', in much the same way as I decline to accept the current mindset that proclaims spray-can graffiti as 'urban art', nearly-naked women parading themselves down the street as being 'empowered', vulgar/hateful lyrics in popular songs as being worthy of praise and recognition, the use of whack-a-doodle treatments (think ivermectin when it was being touted as a 'cure' or 'preventative' for Covid) and the spurning of scientifically-proven treatments as being 'alternative medicine', or Trumpists engaged in a coup attempt to be 'patriots'.

-"BB"-

[Burning Petard]

I refer you to 'Touching a Nerve' by Patricia Churchland, 2013, which explores the physical structures of the brain as the basis for morality, empathy, aggression, free will. From paged 138: 1 in 650 births are XXY (Klinefelter syndrome) 1 in 1000 are born with XYY, 1 in 5000 are born with solo X (Turner syndrome) and 1 in 20,000 are born with XXYY

I think that is a significant number in aggregate. There are laws enacted and proposed in many states that prohibit changing the gender designation on the birth certificate totally disregarding any scientific information available later which may dispute that original designation. It is NOT an easy-to-correct clerical error or mistake of medical judgement.

[Bicycle Bill]

From your cited statistics:
     1 in 20,000 are born with XXYY
     1 in 5000 are born with solo X (Turner syndrome) – which works out to 4 out of 20,000
     1 in 1000 are born with XYY — which means 20 out of 20,000
     1 in 650 births are XXY (Klinefelter syndrome) — for a total of 30.7 per 20,000 births ... and I'll even round that up to 32, just to be nice.

So that means out of 20,000 births, we have a total of 57 persons who are born with these four anomalies.   That means that 19,943 are born with the expected XY configuration.   And if we convert that to percentages, you wind up with 99.715% of the population fitting the 'norm', and 0.285% (that's ZERO point two-eight-five percent) falling into those four other categories.   Sorry, but to me, that percentage is the definition of insignificant.

-"BB"-

[Burning Petard]

Yes, that percentage is very small. In my daily life I do not deal with thousands, or millions or even hundreds. The one person standing next to me is one person and I need a lot of data, not just gambling percentages, to judge just where on the bell curve that individual is on any particular human quality.

That is why I constantly struggle to be kind to nearly everyone. And wesw, that is why, based solely on the evidence you have presented here on this board, I judge it an honor if you refer to me as a burning retard.

[Big RR]

Mapping of the human genome is still ongoing, and many genetic sequences that were dismissed as "junk DNA" a very few years ago are now shown to have a large role in some inherited traits. The same will likely be true of gender; we have known for years that XX and Xy play a big part in gender determination, just as we have known that genitalia also is a big determinant (and, is, indeed, the way gender is assigned at birth in the vast majority of cases), but nature is not quite that simple, and many more determinants will be likely to be discovered in the future. But the simple fact is this, some individuals are, through no fault of parenting or other environmental factors, not "comfortable" (for want of a better word) with the gender assigned at birth, and become more actualized (and "comfortable") as another gender (or perhaps none). Why this bothers or threatens anyone is beyond me. Sure it raises some issues that do need to be dealt with (such as in sports), but for the most part is of little or no consequence other than to people close to them. But for some reason, people have to rant and rave about it. Why?

[Burning Petard]

Big, (may I call you by your first name?) I will attempt to answer your question. Simple two words.

Stupid. Ignorant.

See the entry above for the Miss Teen USA 2007. These two words seem to be almost incomprehensible to many people.

snailgate