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.

For many years now, publications such as Glamour have walked a fine line, cheerleading for mental health, raising awareness about eating disorders, telling readers they’re perfect just as they are — but wouldn’t a £30 lipstick, a “price on request handbag” and the odd “tweakment” make them even better? In Glossyland, as in porn, “woman” is defined by femininity. At the same time, the market is made up of boring old females, creatures who will never be plumped-up and artificial enough.

This is something the magazines have learned to use to their advantage. The feminine ideal shames women into buying things they don’t need, in an effort to become something other than ordinary flesh and blood. It’s only natural that any business model which relies on this — horror of the adult human female, hidden behind pseudo-progressive language — would love trans activism.

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 centered 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.

In true industry style, Glamour hides cruelty in breathless prose that claims to speak for the marginalized. That Faye and others feel victimized by the very idea of female people having their own changing rooms, toilets, prisons, refuges and even words is not news. What’s especially disturbing here is the framing. Historically, women’s glossies have switched back and forth between “progressive” posturing and anti-feminist bullying in order to keep readers feeling bad. Here, the two things are completely merged.

As a female reader, you are not only supposed to feel insufficiently feminine. Should you have even the slightest sense that women are not femininity-defined dolls, you are also supposed to feel shame at your privilege and moral inferiority. In the past, these magazines used feminist cheerleading to mitigate the body-shaming. Now the body-shaming — at its purest level, femaleness-shaming — is what passes for feminism.

Trans activism has permitted magazines such as Glamour to say the quiet part out loud. Rather than the “Women of the Year” headlines, what is most troubling is that so many women, for so many years, have been encouraged to hurt and hate themselves due to the cult of femininity.

Give it up, ladies: you’ll never be enough and it’s time to stop trying. At least now they’re telling you to your face.

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Victoria Smith is a writer and creator of the Glosswitch newsletter.

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