Judging from the comments and in many cases, hate, hurled at Missosology’s Miss Universe 2018 1st Hot Picks, it is easy to see that humans tend to fear or hate on what they don’t understand. Spain’s Angela Ponce topped the list and since she has been labelled as a “transgender”, the Hot Picks, elicited insults and ridicule.
There are many reasons why most of us have repulsive attitude towards “transgenders” that attempted to participate in major international pageants but the root cause of it all is ignorance. It escapes to the most of us that human sexuality is not simply black and white. The spectrum by which it resides have both baffled and awed even the seasoned sexologists.
The majority of us may have been blessed for having well defined genitalia but for some people that is not the case. A classic example is the South African gold medalist runner Caster Semenya who identifies as a female but was subjected to a gender test. It was found out that she has no ovaries but have internal testes and she was classified as a hermaphrodite. In the end, she was declared a female.
The definition of being a woman is complex. Not having a female genitalia does not automatically make you a male as much as physically removing the ovary, vagina and uterus from a woman does not undo her womanhood. Spain has enacted laws that allows transgenders to be legally recognized by the gender that they associate with. That makes Angela Ponce legally a woman and if being a woman is a prerequisite for joining the Miss Universe, what’s all the fuss about? We don’t know the true physiological case of Angela but it is highly doubtful that one day she simply decided to remove her male genitalia in exchange for that of a woman’s.
It is time to be more accepting of things that deviate from what we used to. This is not about the changing times but rather this is about the fact that our knowledge about sexuality and gender have widened. What’s sad is that somehow, this kind of knowledge have narrowed in some people. One can only hope that the Miss Universe Organization and the rest of the Big5 pageants will have a pro-active approach that will encourage more openness, acceptance and tolerance and discourage hate and close-mindedness.
