20 Oct Playboy Have Announced Their First Transgender Playmate

Playboy has always been famed for being ahead of its time. Its founder, the late Hugh Hefner, was one of the LGBTQ+ community’s earliest allies, and from the 1950s onwards, he used the magazine as a platform to change societal norms.

In 1955, Hefner published The Crooked Man. It was a short story about a world where heterosexuals were persecuted because homosexuality was the norm, turning society’s then attitudes on their head to show how wrong they were.

Whilst attitudes towards homosexuality have improved over the years, with the decriminalisation of sodomy in 1962 and, more recently, the legalization of gay marriage in 2015, many members of the LGBTQ+ community still remain persecuted.

Until the noughties, the challenges transgender people face remained relatively unknown as they did not have any high profile allies. But that all changed in 2015 when Caitlyn Jenner came out, bringing the issue to the fore of popular culture.

Now transgender people are making waves in a number of arenas, with actresses like Laverne Cox using their fame to further transgender rights. However, transgender people remain the most persecuted members of the LGBTQ+ community.

To help normalize the fact that gender exists on a spectrum, Playboy announced that it would be having its first transgender playmate on the cover of its November 2017 issue, having first allowed transgender a woman to grace its pages in 1981.

Although it was not publicised that Playboy had a transgender model in 1981, Caroline Cossey, pictured above, was outed a year later by tabloids. She used the controversy to help the transgender community and appeared in the magazine again in 1991.

However, the majority of straight men’s attitudes towards transgender women have not changed, and Playboy‘s decision to have its first transgender playmate has been met with a barrage of criticism from fans of the men’s magazine.

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