Mick Hartley

Since the trans idea of women is all about feminine performance – ie glamour – it makes a kind of sense for Glamour UK Magazine to feature nine transified men on the latest cover as their women of the year.

Victoria Smith at UnHerd:

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

It’s true, I suppose, of all glossy magazines that depend on advertising: they need to shame you into thinking that you’re never quite good enough – that you need that extra something to really live your life to the full. For women that extra bit – the femininity, the glamour – seems to tally rather well with what transified men think of as the totality of being a woman. So here we are, at the logical conclusion of their position: it’s glamour and performance all the way down, and biology counts for nothing.

There’s nothing surprising or edgy about Glamour’s latest cover, featuring nine glossily-styled trans women wearing “protect the dolls” t-shirts alongside the headline “Women of the Year”. In the article accompanying the image, Shon Faye writes that “the T-shirt and its slogan blew up after the UK Supreme Court handed down a judgment on the meaning of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 that excluded trans women from the definition.”

That’s right. After the UK Supreme Court confirmed 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 “woman” 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 — like porn, like gender identity ideology — dispense with femaleness before anything else.

Perhaps people can now see the absurdity of where this nonsense all leads.