Why is Glamour honouring men as its Women of the Year?

Since 1999, Glamour magazine has celebrated its Women of the Year Awards – an initiative to honour ‘extraordinary and inspirational’ women from a variety of fields. This year, in a special Women of the Year feature, the UK edition has chosen to honour nine men.

‘Glamour UK gathered nine dolls – transwomen working across fashion, music, publishing and activism’, who it deems to be ‘the community’s most ground-breaking voices’. Among these ‘dolls’ is actor Bel Priestley, model Munroe Bergdorf, as well as various other ‘content creators’ and ‘activists’. The cover-shot depicts them posing in full glam on a London rooftop, each wearing an iteration of designer Connor Ives’s now infamous ‘Protect the Dolls’ t-shirt.

‘Trans people – and especially transwomen – are facing a committed attempt… to make exclusionary policy the default across British public life’, writes the article’s author, transwoman Shon Faye. He claims that transwomen’s exclusion from female ‘toilets, changing rooms, leisure facilities, workplaces, hospital wards and crisis-support services’ speaks to a clear intention ‘to drive us out of public life to repress, then deny our existence’. He also decries ‘increasingly poor healthcare access’, citing the ‘blanket ban on access to medication for trans people under 18’. (Note the staunch avoidance of the word ‘children’ to describe these under-18s, who until recently were given experimental puberty blockers, with little regard to the long-term harms.)

Beneath a shot of the ‘dolls’ artfully arranged in the sunlight in their short skirts – and, in one case, what appears to be a pair of belted leather underwear – Faye claims that transwomen are subjected to ‘misogynistic violence’. Yet the ensuing interviews suggest it is the trans ‘community’ that has a misogyny problem.

‘I would like to turn on a TV programme and not be blindsided with a trans joke’, muses musician and dj Mya Mehmi, before going on to make fun of actual women – or ‘bitches’, as he prefers to call them:

‘I think people just need to understand, not only are we human, most of us are badder than everyone else. Put some respect on it, bitch! I look better than you. I dress better than you. I smell better than you. Please learn that and understand that.’

One of the most galling comments was made by Bel Priestley, who claims ‘transphobia is really accepted… people in the public eye make comments about trans people all the time and no one really calls them out on it.’ What he really means by ‘transphobia’ here is the denial that men can become women at will – an opinion that ordinary British women (the type who aren’t invited to do cover shoots for high-fashion magazines) have had to go all the way to the Supreme Court to defend. Don’t these women deserve more credit than trans activists – who, let’s face it, are campaigning against women’s rights?

When asked what it might mean to combat ‘transphobia’ and ‘protect the dolls’, Parisian model Ceval Omar says ‘I think it should, first and foremost, be “pay the dolls”’. The others agree that ‘the main way you protect a doll is to book one: more than just affection, transwomen need employment, opportunities and money’. The narcissism and entitlement drip off the page.

The Glamour Women of the Year Award is undoubtedly a slap in the face for women – although one that’s more tedious than painful, admittedly. Our cheeks are numb at this point. The fashion world may want to keep on indulging this misogynistic fantasy, but the rest of us have long grown out of the play-pretend.

Georgina Mumford is an editorial assistant at spiked.