{"id":236050,"date":"2025-10-31T14:22:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-31T14:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/236050\/"},"modified":"2025-10-31T14:22:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-31T14:22:12","slug":"glamour-magazines-trans-cover-shames-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/236050\/","title":{"rendered":"Glamour magazine\u2019s trans cover shames women"},"content":{"rendered":"

Glossy magazines have always had a complex relationship with their female readership. How do you convince a woman that you\u2019re rooting for her \u2014 that you\u2019re all about her empowerment \u2014 while ensuring that she never feels good about herself? How do you maintain that feeling of inadequacy \u2014 she is too fat, too old, too unfashionable \u2014 on which your advertisers depend? It\u2019s not as though you can tell her directly. You have to make her believe the self-hatred comes from within.<\/p>\n

For many years now, publications such as Glamour have walked a fine line, cheerleading<\/a> for mental health, raising awareness about eating disorders, telling readers they\u2019re perfect just as they are \u2014 but wouldn\u2019t a \u00a330 lipstick, a \u201cprice on request handbag\u201d and the odd \u201ctweakment\u201d make them even better? In Glossyland, as in porn, \u201cwoman\u201d is defined by femininity. At the same time, the market is made up of boring old females, creatures who will never be plumped-up and artificial enough.<\/p>\n

This is something the magazines have learned to use to their advantage. The feminine ideal shames women into buying things they don\u2019t need, in an effort to become something other than ordinary flesh and blood. It\u2019s only natural that any business model which relies on this \u2014 horror of the adult human female, hidden behind pseudo-progressive language \u2014 would love trans activism.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing surprising or edgy about Glamour\u2019s latest cover<\/a>, featuring nine glossily-styled trans women wearing \u201cprotect the dolls\u201d t-shirts alongside the headline \u201cWomen of the Year\u201d. In the article accompanying the image, Shon Faye writes that \u201cthe T-shirt and its slogan blew up after the UK Supreme Court handed down a judgment on the meaning of \u2018sex\u2019 in the Equality Act 2010 that excluded trans women from the definition.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s right. After the UK Supreme Court confirmed<\/a> in April that women should be defined by femaleness (humanity) rather than femininity (artificiality), a counter-movement arose which centred on the idea of women as dolls. No one on the Glamour cover is female. This is the magazine ideal of \u201cwoman\u201d boiled down to its purest essence: plastic breasts, pouty lips, long hair, low body fat. The issue here is not that a female person cannot also possess such features. It is that when it comes to deciding what is a necessary attribute of womanhood, glossy magazines \u2014 like porn, like gender identity ideology \u2014 dispense with femaleness before anything else.<\/p>\n

In true industry style, Glamour hides cruelty in breathless prose that claims to speak for the marginalised. That Faye and others feel victimised by the very idea of female people having their own changing rooms, toilets, prisons, refuges and even words is not news. What\u2019s especially disturbing here is the framing. Historically, women\u2019s glossies have switched back and forth between \u201cprogressive\u201d posturing and anti-feminist bullying in order to keep readers feeling bad. Here, the two things are completely merged.<\/p>\n

As a female reader, you are not only supposed to feel insufficiently feminine. Should you have even the slightest sense that women are not femininity-defined dolls, you are also supposed to feel shame at your privilege and moral inferiority. In the past, these magazines used feminist cheerleading to mitigate the body-shaming. Now the body-shaming \u2014 at its purest level, femaleness-shaming \u2014 is what passes for feminism.<\/p>\n

Trans activism has permitted magazines such as Glamour to say the quiet part out loud. Rather than the \u201cWomen of the Year\u201d headlines, what is most troubling is that so many women, for so many years, have been encouraged to hurt and hate themselves due to the cult of femininity.<\/p>\n

Give it up, ladies: you\u2019ll never be enough and it\u2019s time to stop trying. At least now they\u2019re telling you to your face.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Glossy magazines have always had a complex relationship with their female readership. How do you convince a woman…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":236051,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,709,59,99934,99935,16505,52841,56,1955,54,55,658],"class_list":{"0":"post-236050","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-fashion","10":"tag-gb","11":"tag-magazines","12":"tag-misogyny","13":"tag-porn","14":"tag-trans-activism","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-uncategorized","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-unitedkingdom","19":"tag-women"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}