Glamour magazine has named a transgender model to its 2023 Women of the Year list, forgoing the requirement of having to be an actual female to receive the award.
Geena Rocero is an author and activist. Glamour named six women along with Rocero, including actresses, models, and an abortion-activist doctor, in its Nov. 1 announcement.
This isn’t Rocero’s first women’s title. He also became the first trans woman ambassador for Miss Universe Nepal in 2020 and the first trans Asian-Pacific Islander woman to be named Playboy magazine’s Playmate of the Year in 2019, according to Glamour’s Instagram post celebrating Rocero’s award.
“She’s also advocated for trans rights at the White House, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum, and in her native Philippines,” the Instagram caption continued. “Still, Rocero says we have a long way to go.”
The comments sections of Glamour’s Instagram posts for the “Women of the Year” campaign are filled with dissenting opinions on the choice to put a biological male on the list.
Glamour’s write-up of Rocero commemorating the award is titled “Geena Rocero Is Writing Her Truth.” It features details about the memoir Rocero published this year. Rocero was a pageant “queen” in the Philippines before becoming an activist for the “voiceless” trans community in the United States, Glamour wrote.
The article recounts how Rocero’s memoir explores “universal themes of womanhood: belonging, confidence, and love,” and describes him as beautiful, intelligent, and graceful.
“The [memoir] chronicles fleeting and consequential loves throughout her life,” Glamour wrote. “But after a period of ‘casual, carefree and cathartic’ encounters with various men, she met her forever love, Norman.”
“I’ve sprinkled the world with my world, with my way of thinking, with my magical sense of things,” Rocero is quoted as saying in the Glamour article.
The story also mentions how Rocero frequently spoke about [sexual] pleasure throughout his book tour. “I was really living my life, playful, sensual, sleeping with whoever I want. You know, the hottest people that I know,” Rocero said.
Dylan Mulvaney is another male-born transgender who received a “Woman of the Year Award” this year. Mulvaney’s award, which Heritage Foundation scholar Sarah Parshall Perry criticized, came from Virgin Atlantic’s Attitude magazine. Parshall Perry is a senior legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
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