So the pageant is judging beauty by feminine standards, right?
I know for a stone cold fact that if I get some judges together and stand next to RuPaul in a bathing suit, I’m toast. The fact that RuPaul is a man is immaterial - (s)he is more beautiful by feminine standards. The same might be (okay, probably is) true for a transgendered or intersexed person.
I do agree that the governing body of the Miss Universe Pageant has the right to restrict participation based on their own criteria. They would be equally within their rights to make it mandatory to be a natural blonde. However, when they are judging by appearances, they should admit contestants by that same criteria.
Dumbguy, think how much more fun the pageant would be to watch that way. You could start a pool - each guy watching would have to present his preferred scoring list in advance, and at the end of the show, genders would be announced. Certainly some whoopin’ and hollerin’ to be had, and a possible rethinking of sexual preferences.
If this person won the event then she obviously convinced the judges of her effeminacy, her confidence, her intelligence, and her attractiveness. Furthermore, she wants to be a woman, and she’s got the right plumbing to pull it off.
Ask yourself this: if you met a transgendered person, had sex with that person, then moved on and never discovered that person’s secret, are you a bisexual? Hell, no. So what’s the big deal?
The big deal is… drumroll please…
homophobia.
Seriously. She walks and talks so much like a duck that she wins the best duck contest. Until you find out she wasn’t a duck at one time. Oooh, now things are different. She’s the best duck, but we’re going to re-write the rules because something undetectable by our closest scrutiny makes us feel all oogy inside. That’s homophobia, in my book.
So here we are come to the momentous day when I boldly leap out of the closet. I proudly declare this:
If I ever meet a charming, hot-as-balls transgendered woman, and don’t know she was formerly a man, and I get the chance, I’m gonna do her.
Well, admittedly, several of their other standards do not relate well to appearance. It may no longer be the case, but they used to require participants to be virgins, and I believe they still require that they be unmarried. Of course, this is not all that surprising, since beauty pageants are just remnants of brideshopping exhibitions.
Well, we can’t have NONE of that. People might be made uncomfortable by it.
KellyM, SomeGuy - I did not mean that the criteria adopted by the Miss Universe rules are correct. I did mean (as Collounsbury said) that I have no problem with them restricting their (stupid) contest to one gender or sex, depending on the reason for the division. In my post above I was using gender and sex interchangeably, which was a mistake. From now on I will use gender for the social, behavioral and psychological traits, and sex for the biological traits.
How about this reasoning:
In the case of sporting events: the reason for separating men from women is the different physical properties of men vs. women. In that case, it would seem that transgendered people should participate with competitors of the same sex. Someone born with XY chromosomes will have a male body type even after the sex change operation. How much influence will hormonal treatments have on the height/strength/muscle characteristics?
Which, in my understanding, would put me in opposition with SomeGuy and in accordance with the IOC on how to determine the event for competitors.
In the case of beauty contests: the reason for separating men from women is because (as I said above) of the different criteria for beauty for men vs. women. Since our criteria for beauty seem to be mostly a social construct, then transgendered people should compete with people of the same gender.
The problem, Arnold, is that XY chromosones are simply the potential for being male. If someone say gets the female hormones at age 13 they wont develop any male characteristics. However after around age 18 they start to have a lesser effect. They wouldn’t change height but they would change muscles and strength. The chromosones could mean everything or nothing.
Collunsbury is right that genetics determine the majority of people, however that does not mean that the genetic testing is used on the majority of people. The rest “can be ressolved” by getting screwed I suspect.
Even in an adult, the hormonal switch affects strength. Testosterone encourages muscle buildup even in adults and a MTF who starts hormone therapy will lose strength unless she works aggressively to maintain it, more so than she would have had she not started hormones. The effect is more pronounced after the orchiectomy is performed (since at that point testosterone production drops to the baseline in a normal female).
On the sports issue: a female-to-male contestant will likely have an advantage over a biological female because of the testosterone factor. And a male-to-female contestant will be at a disadvantage to a biological male for the same reason.
I should point out that my post above is not meant to cover adult transsexuality in any meaningful way. Yhe issue there is very, very complicated, and any answer will be arbitrary to a certain extent, so I’m going to to simply not address it unless absolutely necessary.
What I was referring to (as far as IOC/ international sporting rules and proposals for gender-typing based on their standards) was the case of prenatal hormonal development irregularity. In general, a fetus begins with generic sexual organs ( the Müllerian ducts that will develop as female unless a specific hormonal sequence alters their development into male organs. If, for any of a number of extremely rare reasons, the initial hormonal development fails to occur, the result may be a person who has XY sex chromosomes, but with functional female sexual development- this includes the ovaries, therefore ensuring full female development at puberty.
Since it’s possible that the only observable symptom of this condition will be slightly lower fertility, it’s entirely possible for such a person not to ever be aware of their condition.
I submit that such a person is female, with a minor genetic fluke. They happen to have a Y chromosome, that’s all.
2.Such a person will certainly have a completely female physiology. They will have natural breasts, whether average-sized or not, abdominal musculature will be overlaying a uterus and attached to a wider pelvis than that of a male. It goes without saying that they will have a vaginal canal.
Such a person is highly unlikely to blunder into a beauty contest or sports competition with the intent of commiting fraud. They are much more likely to be entirely unaware of their genetic quirk.
The incidence of female athletes, at least, being banned from Olympic competition, at least, for “unlawful” possession of an X chromosome is extremely small, but nonzero. These women were banned, not because of any advantage they had, but purely as an artifact of the testing method the IOC insists on maintaining. This is genetic discrimination.
There happens to be an ancient, common-sense, infallible, non-discriminatory, non-invasive method of determining a person’s physical sex: you can ask them to take their clothes off. The fact that it is superior in so many respects means that it ought to be the explicit standard in cases where sex-determination is of some importance.
Okay, there’s my position … and now it’s longer than the way I originally stated it
I read a story 2 or 3 Olympics back about a woman who had the exact situation that Some Guy is describing–she had been a crack tennis player her whole life, and late in her teens it was discovered that she had XY chomosomes. She was more or less told to give up her Olympic hopes (apparently she was very very good and had had serious aspirations to the Olympics)because the “less-invasive” genetic test would disqualify her.
The problem with intersexed individuals is that there is a continum of differences, and the question of where to draw the line is signifigant. For example, some women have XY chomosomes, testicles that have never desended, and a vagina that just dead-ends. Apparently, women with this condition have testoterone levels somewhere between what is normal for a man or a woman–so they are, on average, taller and stronger than the average woman. This is definitly a genetic advantage for beauty and sports. But by definition all beauty contest and Olympic conterders have some sort of Genetic advantage–does it really matter if part of that advantage happens to occur on the sex chromosomes?
Asmodean, KellyM - if from a medical point of view muscle build-up in a transgendered person is more similar to the “non-native” sex, and assuming that muscle build-up is the reason for having separate competitions for men and women in sporting events, then I would agree that the transgendered person should compete in the event appropriate to the sex corresponding to their body characteristics.
Some Guy - your solution of inspecting the primary sexual characteristics (penis vs. vagina) would not be effective to remedy the inequality mentioned by KellyM in this case: “Even in an adult, the hormonal switch affects strength. Testosterone encourages muscle buildup even in adults and a MTF who starts hormone therapy will lose strength unless she works aggressively to maintain it, more so than she would have had she not started hormones.”
KellyM, Asmodean - what are your suggestions for determining valid entries in a) beauty contests restricted to one sex, and b) athletic events restricted to one sex?
I saw on E or Entertainment Tonight (hey, it’s mental litter) the blurb about this. All I could think when I saw the picture of Elodie putting her hands to her face, was
“She’s got very masculine looking hands.” Thicker than her waifish little body.
As I said above, I explicitly disclaim any knowledge of the proper solution in this case. Even for someone as trans-friendly as I happen to be, it’s a very complex issue, because of the fact there will be actual biological differences (for example, while two people with a similar estrogen level and workout regimen will have a similar muscle density, the one who was born with a uterus and vagina will have a different abdominal muscle structure than the one who is taking estrogen to correct for their lack of ovaries. Note that the advantage may well be on the side of the “natural born” woman in some respects, especially with regards to the pelvic muscles. The female-to-male case is even more complicated, since there may be a theoretical advantage to being considered in with the “wrong” (original) sex.
My gut feeling is that, in practice, competitions that have no expected gender difference should have no gender-typing (riflery or dressage, for example, are simply segregated because, hey, we segregate everything). For competitions where there’s an expected gender difference, I simply don’t see any easy yardstick.
Probable best practice: have transsexuals compete as their assigned gender, and monitor the statistical results. If they consistently outperform (or underperform) people of their assumed gender, with appropriate statistical significance, a change is probably in order. Of course, this also presumes a large sample of transsexual athletes (or beauty pageant contestants), which we do not presently have - and we are unlikely to ever have a really large sample. Without data to show an unfair advantage, though, there’s no grounds to assume that it will be there.
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[li]Beauty contests are shallow in the first place.[/li][/QUOTE]
… and, sadly, such competitions as Olympic women’s figure skating, Olympic women’s gymnastics, and the Best Actress Oscar, are being turned into beauty contests. (The recent Best Actress Oscar acceptance speeches of Gwyneth Paltrow and Julia Roberts were eerily reminiscent of what one would expect in a beauty contest, IMnsHO.)
