Glamour UK's October 2025 Women of the Year cover featuring nine trans women has won Cover of the Year at the Professional Publishing Association Awards. The cover, shot for the Protect The Dolls campaign, sparked a global conversation about trans inclusion in feminism and has now received the publishing industry's highest recognition.
What happened, and why does it matter?
In October 2025, Glamour UK published their annual Women of the Year cover series. One cover from that series featured nine trans women wearing Conner Ives' Protect The Dolls tees. The Not A Phase organisation helped platform the moment, and it immediately sparked exactly the kind of global conversation that such visibility tends to provoke: celebration from people who had long waited to see trans women centred in a mainstream feminist space, and hostility from people who disputed whether they belonged there at all.
Then, at the Professional Publishing Association Awards, the cover won Cover of the Year. The publishing industry, in other words, looked at that image and said: yes. This.
I find that genuinely moving. Not because a prize fixes anything, but because it tells us something real about where the culture is, even when the political noise suggests otherwise.
Can you imagine forcing any of these women into male spaces?
Look at that cover. Nine women. Confident, visible, joyful, present. Now try to hold in your mind the argument, made seriously by serious people in courts and parliaments and newspaper columns, that these women should be directed to men's toilets, men's changing rooms, men's hospital wards, men's prisons, men's sports teams.
I am not being rhetorical. I am asking you to actually do it. Picture the woman on that cover walking into a men's changing room because a court ruled she must. Picture her being placed in a men's prison ward. Picture her standing on the sideline of a men's sports fixture.
It is absurd. It is cruel. And it has nothing to do with safety or fairness and everything to do with a refusal to accept that these women are women.
The argument for excluding trans women from women's spaces has always depended on a kind of wilful not-looking: an insistence on a category called "biological sex" that overrides everything you can actually see, everything the person has lived, everything their body has become, everything their identity is. The Glamour cover makes the not-looking harder. These are women. They have always been women. They are celebrated as women by one of the UK's most prominent women's magazines, and the professional publishing industry just gave that cover its highest honour.
What the PPA award actually signals
The Professional Publishing Association represents the UK publishing industry: the editors, art directors, publishers, and media professionals who shape what the culture sees and how it sees it. When they give Cover of the Year to an image of nine trans women on a feminist platform, they are not making a political statement in the sense of choosing a side in an abstract debate. They are recognising craft, impact, and cultural significance.
The cover achieved all three. It was striking. It landed. It meant something. That is what great magazine covers do, and that is why it won.
What I take from this, beyond the immediate warmth of seeing it recognised, is that the visibility argument is working. Representation does shift perception. People who had never thought carefully about what it means to exclude trans women from feminist spaces were confronted by that image and had to think. Some of them changed their minds. Others dug in. But nobody got to keep not-thinking, which is where most harm quietly lives.
Trans women and feminism: the conversation the cover opened
The framing of trans inclusion as a threat to feminism has always struck me as one of the stranger intellectual contortions of recent years. Feminism is, at its core, a project about refusing to let people be defined and constrained by the bodies they were born into. The idea that it should then turn around and define and constrain trans women by theirs is not a coherent position. It is a contradiction.
The Glamour cover said something different. It said that trans women belong in the feminist conversation, that their lives are part of the intersectional picture that contemporary feminism is trying to hold, and that celebrating them is not in tension with celebrating other women. It is the same thing.
Not A Phase has been doing this work for years: making trans people visible, beautiful, and undeniable. Conner Ives made a tee that said protect them. Glamour put it on their cover. The PPA gave it the award. Each of those steps matters, because each of them says to a trans woman somewhere: you exist, you are seen, you are worth celebrating.
The gap between visibility and safety
I want to be honest about what a cover and a prize do not do. They do not change the law. They do not undo the Supreme Court interpretation of the Equality Act. They do not reopen the gender clinics, restore access to puberty blockers, or shorten the waiting lists that stretch into years. They do not make a trans woman safe in a hostile workplace, or keep a trans teenager from being bullied at school.
Visibility is necessary but not sufficient. What it does is shift the ground of the argument. It becomes harder to speak about trans women as hypothetical figures, as abstract threats, as political symbols, when there are nine of them looking directly at you from the cover of a major magazine, wearing a tee that asks you to protect them.
The question I keep returning to is the one I opened with. Can you actually imagine forcing those women into male spaces? If you can, I think you are not really seeing them. And if you cannot, then you have already understood the argument.
What this moment means for trans people reading it now
If you are trans, or if you love someone who is, I want you to have this. A mainstream magazine featured nine trans women as women of the year. The publishing industry said it was the best cover of the year. That happened. It is real.
The news cycle will move on. The political fights will continue. There will be more rulings and more restrictions and more moments that make you wonder whether any of it is getting better. But this is also true: the culture is not a monolith, and within it there are editors and photographers and judges and voters who looked at that cover and said yes. There are more of them than the noise suggests.
You deserve to be seen like that. Not as a controversy, not as a debate, not as a question to be settled. As a woman. As a person. As someone worth celebrating.
If there is a topic that you would like me to cover, just let Sammy know.
Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, writer, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives at the centre of both.
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