The 11th “cycle” of America’s Next Top Model premiered last night and it was really worth the two hours The CW allotted for it. This season promises to be the most daring ever because Isis is the first transgender contestant. Amelia and I couldn’t wait to start IMing about the new contestants and, of course Tyra, when we got into The Frisky offices this morning. Our chat is after the jump, but also check out the video clip above. First, Gossip Girl, then 90210, and now ANTM...this has been a great week for TV. [Um, and a bad week for reading and outdoor activities.—Editor]

We’re extremely excited about the return of either of our favorite shows this fall, but we’ve realized that a season finale refresher is in order. Hey, when our lives and our homies’ lives have real cliffhangers, we can’t be expected to remember months later what happened to our friends on TV, too. Read our updates just in time for the start of the fall TV season on September 2.

Each season of America’s Next Top Model has a sob story or a gimmick, a model that is just so different from the competition, that host Tyra Banks has decided to take under her wing and mold into the perfect supermodel. Usually this gives Tyra a platform to “save” someone and then applaud herself for being so courageous—at first, this “different” model was just, say, overweight (only last season did a big girl actually stick around long enough to win), or from the streets. But as the seasons went on, Tyra and crew had to find someone with a more dramatic story—a refugee from Africa, a woman with Asperger’s Disorder, a woman who had been raped and molested, and a woman who had experienced domestic violence. Last season, I thought Tyra peaked with the sadness by casting an African woman who had experienced genital mutilation. Though she was gorgeous and certainly a worthy competitor, it did seem like another cheap ploy for Tyra, again, to toot her own groundbreaking horn.

Well, this season the gimmick isn’t sad, but it sure is daring. One of the models on the new season, which premieres September 3, is a transgender woman (who was born a man) named Isis, 22, from Maryland. Sure, in the past many of the models who have appeared on Top Model have looked like drag queens (love you Dominique!), but this is a pretty fantastic step for a popular reality show on a major network to take. While transgender characters have appeared on TV shows like Nip/Tuck, The L Word, Ugly Betty, and even the soap opera All My Children, but never on an American reality show. So here’s a pat on the back Tyra, from The Frisky. Give that hand a rest! [Us Weekly]

And you know what? She looks GREAT. We were worried when she won that the whole “plus-size model” thing was just a conspiracy to make Tyra and the America’s Next Top Model producers look good, but it seems Whitney has kept her gorgeous, curvy figure. Here she is on a photoshoot. If we were the types to say things like, “You go girl”, we would say it right now. [New York City, 7/28/08]

We have some news for Tyra Banks—a size eight dress isn’t plus size and America’s Next Top Model winner Whitney Thompson ain’t no fat girl charity case. The new “plus sized” model is on the cover of the June issue of Seventeen, sending the message to America’s highest risk group for eating disorders that a perfectly fit size eight means you’re a big girl. Adolescents already have enough body issues without a thin girl getting called thick. This is some major mean-girl fashionista bull crap. If you’re gonna give us a plus-size superstar, she better be big enough to play the part. [Bitten & Bound]

That’s Whitney from America’s Next Top Model Cycle 10—she’s the plus-size model in the final three in tonight’s season finale. I have no idea if this is Whitney before she was on the show or if it’s a recent picture, but girlfriend is significantly skinnier. I hope this is a picture from awhile ago and Whitney has since embraced her more natural, fuller figure. If this is recent and she’s lost as much as 20 pounds? Boo! Stupid diet industry… [Oh No They Didn’t!]

Over the course of its many seasons, America’s Next Top Model (a new episode airs tonight) had tread into some fairly risque and/or controversial territory, though not in the way that Tyra Banks intends. Though she thinks the shoe has gotten “edgier” and more “fierce”, a number of women’s sites and organizations have cried fowl over some of Tyra’s creative choices when it comes to the photo shoots—a couple seasons ago, the models were photographed as highly sexy looking corpses, which many said glamorized sexual assault. Now a blog called “Menstrual Poetry” (stay with me ladies!) says that the current season’s opening montage features the women looking like less like models and more like, um, whores. “Her entire attitude in the first 15 seconds exudes sex–not modelesque, look at me kind of sexy, but look at me and give me a dollar bill sexy. When the America’s Next Top Model hopefuls are pictured, we are given a series of somewhat disturbing images including a few in particular of Kimberly, Dominique and Marvita, who look like prostitutes waiting in a dark alleyway.”

We think it goes without saying that the red carpet was a hot tranny mess. Seriously. Like, trannies couldn’t have been trannier. Also, why is “fierce” spelled with two e’s? That’s not a typo. [DListed]

The best episodes of America’s Next Top Model are the ones in which Tyra takes time out of her busy schedule and teaches the contestants about posing. On Wednesday’s episode she gave them a very useful tip—when you can’t think of a pose, pretend you’re in pain. In the clip above, Tyra shows them just how couture and high-fashion menstrual cramps can look in a photograph. [CW: America’s Next Top Model]

Claire is totally my pick to win Top Model this season and she might seriously be the first worthy contestant to win the fierce hot tranny mess beauty pageant in eight seasons. Even though Tyra gave Claire a Susan Powter makeover, she rocks the photo shoots week after week. She’s also a married mom with a endearing personality and a cool indie spirit that doesn’t grate on your last nerve like past Top Model contestants Naima and YaYa. Also, sometimes she drinks her own breast milk. For real. [CW: America’s Next Top Model]

Dozens of women burned their bras on the street in New York City. While in the 60’s, that behavior was invented by the strong feminist leadership trying to destroy the social conventions they were bound by, in 2008 it just took Tyra. On her daytime chat show, TyTy did yet another “get the right fit for you”-style show.  Earlier in the year she did jeans (and still managed to show off her thong) as she encouraged her audience to rip their pants off. This time, she did bras and got her fans topless—officially proving Tyra can get a woman to strip faster than tequila shots. At the bra bonfire, her brave regular gal audience strutted their half-naked stuff on a frigid winter day—talk about commitment. Take that America’s Next Top Models! [Dlisted]

America’s Next Top Model is kind of a reason for living. Which may explain why so many of the contestants have insane sob stories to tell during the audition process. Each year it seems like there’s always one girl who’s been through a really hard time—Tiffany grew up in the ‘hood; Amanda, the fair beauty who’s going blind; Brittany, who got into a car accident and suffered brain damage that affects her short term memory; the list goes on and on. But this year, for Cycle 10, Tyra and Company found some girls from the school of hard knocks that made our jaws drop. Dominique was in an abusive relationship; Marvita was raped; and Fatima, who was born in Somalia, was circumsized as a child. Umm, isn’t this supposed to be a light-hearted show about modeling and drag queens and being fierce? Tyra just loves to exploit the sad back stories of her contestants for ratings and very rarely does one of these women actually win. That said, we have a feeling gorgeous Fatima is going to go far and if her story, featured on a craptastic reality TV show, gets the issue of genital mutilation more attention, than so be it. [CW: America’s Next Top Model]

Saying Tyra Banks is crazy is just redundant.  After all those seasons of the Surreal Life, everyone must know by now that it takes a well-crafted level of “look at me” to make it in the biz.  And in true celeb form, Tyra, the diva of drama queens, who screams all her lines like she’s getting slashed in a B horror movie, wants to be the gravitational pull of public attention. Whether she’s spooning Sherri Shepard on The View or showing off her model moves, she’s always doing something you have to watch like you’re rubbernecking a highway accident.  Unfortunately, in the media lately, she’s been made out to be a more of a car wreck than she deserves. She’s just a TV personality people! So we here at the Frisky just want to stand by our loud and proud lady.  We respect a woman, let alone a model, with a burgeoning career in her 30’s. And we’re super psyched about her new CW reality TV show which will be based on one of our fav movies The Devil Wears Prada.  So go on with your so bad it’s good self Ty Ty, we’ll be watching you compete in America’s Next Top Oprah!

Hillary Clinton is trying to become the first female president, fighting her way for a sacred slot every young girl has dreamed about. Yet there’s been an appalling glut of woman on woman crime in the media. The way some female journalists are responding, you’d think Hillary is running for America’s Next Top Model.

Vogue’s reigning diva, Anna Wintour, has lashed out in her latest “Letter from the Editor”, filling it with fashion advice for Hillary as retaliation for her refusal to do a photo spread for the magazine. Clinton had been featured in the publication before, both as a First Lady and then again when she became a Senator, but this time Hillary declined because she is afraid of looking “too glamorous” or “elitist” to voters. We’ll set Wintour straight, after the jump…