by Georgina Mumford, spiked
Transwomen who campaign against women’s rights are being elevated above actual women.
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.)