Sports Illustrated receives backlash for featuring transwoman Kim Petras on its cover

While on the one hand, Sports Illustrated magazine is receiving a lot of praise from its fans for putting 81-year-old Martha Stewart as a swimsuit model on its cover, it is also receiving a lot of backlash for featuring Kim Petras, a transwoman on the cover too.

In 2006, a 13-year-old Petras appeared on a German television show where she discussed her gender transition. The very next year she appeared in a documentary and a talk show, in a push to get permission for early gender confirmation surgery at age 16. The minimum age for such surgery is 18. News of her request went global and she was soon branded the “world’s youngest transsexual”.

At the age of 16, she was approved for gender-confirmation surgery. In November 2008, Petras completed the surgery. According to The Daily Telegraph, Petras was the youngest person in the world to have had that surgery at the time. “I was asked if I feel like a woman now – but the truth is I have always felt like a woman – I just ended up in the wrong body,” she later told the publication.

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Despite her inspirational journey to self-identity, people did not take well to the fact that she was featured in Sports Illustrated magazine.

“Sports illustrated decided to put a biological man with a bunch of plastic surgery to look like a woman on their cover. It’s an attempt to confuse our men and blur the lines of sexuality. It’s gross and wrong. Fake hair, fake boobs, and lipstick don’t make you a woman,” one Twitter user wrote, while another said, “Sports Illustrated for the second time puts a biological man in their cover, first time was in 2021. This was enough for hubby to finally cancel his @SI_Swimsuit subscription. The erasure of women continues by these “woke” companies…stop supporting this insanity.”

A third quipped, “The 2023 Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition cover model is a biological man with fake boobs. I really hope men are #Done with Sports Illustrated.” A fourth remarked, “The cover model of Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition 2023 is a man.” A fifth posted, “It started w/ a desire to become a real-life Bratz Doll. By the age of 12, he began puberty blockers. Next, cross-sex hormones. Finally, a bunch of reconstructive surgeries & cosmetic procedures. This Sports Illustrated cover is a celebration of something very dark and very sad.”

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One more noted, “How would you like to be a sports illustrated supermodel and find out they didn’t choose you, but they chose a Trans instead to be on the cover of the Swimsuit Edition?” Another said, “This might seem old fashioned, but I preferred it when Sports Illustrated bikini models didn’t have d**ks.”