You’ve Probably Never Been ‘Woman Of The Year,’ But These 9 Men Have

After naming Richard/Rachel Levine, a man who parades around in ladyface, as one of its 2022 “Women of the Year,” USA Today is back to remind us that it doesn’t know — or doesn’t care — what a woman is.

Earlier this week, the outlet released its list of 2023 honorees, and the name getting the most attention is that of Minnesota state Rep. Leigh Finke, a pink-haired man who dresses like a woman and has been in office for less than 12 weeks.

Nothing says “we respect women” like elbowing them out of their own awards to laud a man who makes a mockery of womanhood. Finke isn’t the only man coopting the “woman of the year” pedestal. Here are eight other men who have displaced women at their own game.

Rachel Levine

Finke’s predecessor as USA Today’s token male Woman of the Year, Rachel (formerly known as Richard) Levine, failed upward into a cushy Biden administration gig after condemning thousands of nursing home residents to die of Covid in Pennsylvania.

The Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson is still locked out of Twitter for clearly acknowledging that Levine is a man.

Caitlyn Jenner

Caitlyn Jenner, formerly known as Bruce, was a recipient of one of Glamour Magazine’s Women of the Year awards in 2015. Jenner, a 6’2” former Olympian who began going by “Caitlyn” in 2015, came away with the title of the magazine’s “Transgender Champion.” (One of Jenner’s co-recipients that year was the now-disgraced girlboss fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, whatever that says about the awards committee’s wisdom.)

After Glamour’s decision to name Jenner, a man, among its “women of the year,” James Smith, whose police officer wife was posthumously recognized by the magazine after she died rescuing people from the World Trade Center on 9/11, returned his wife’s award, calling Jenner’s recognition an “insult.”

“Was there no woman in America, or the rest of the world, more deserving than this man?” he asked in an open letter to the magazine.

Laverne Cox

The year before Jenner scored Glamour’s “Woman of the Year” title, the magazine handed it to another man: Roderick Laverne Cox, who now goes by “Laverne.”

Cox’s award from Glamour followed his June 2014 Time Magazine cover, a glowing profile that openly discussed the trans lobby’s attempt to coopt the gay rights movement and boasted about “Fixing Nature’s Mistake.”

MJ Rodriguez

Among Time Magazine’s “Women of the Year” in 2022 was MJ Rodriguez (born Michael Anthony Rodriguez Jr.), a male stage performer who “identifies as an Afro­Latina trans woman,” according to Time.

Over the course of the same year, Rodriguez was lauded as the first transgender entertainer to receive a Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination for lead acting.

Laurel Hubbard

Before he began taking experimental hormones, Hubbard competed in men’s weightlifting. After he competed against women at the 2020 Olympics as part of New Zealand’s team, finishing dead last in the super-heavyweight category, Hubbard was nonetheless named “sportswoman of the year” by New Zealand’s University of Otago. The accolade has been around since 1908.

Ebony Harper

California’s Assembly District 7 named Ebony Harper, a man, as its 2021 Woman of the Year. This year, Harper also received a “California Woman Making History” recognition from Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis. He’s the executive director of a group called “California TRANScends.”

Cecilia Chung

Several years earlier, in 2014, another California district honored a man who goes by the name Cecilia Chung as its “Woman of the Year.” Phil Ting, San Francisco’s assemblyman, bestowed the award on him a year after Chung successfully pressured San Francisco officials to make their city the first in the country to pay for uninsured residents’ mutilative sex surgeries.

Bonus: Lia Thomas

Lia Thomas, a man who competed under his given name, William, through his sophomore year of college, was nominated by the University of Pennsylvania for the NCAA’s 2022 Woman of the Year award. While Thomas wasn’t ultimately selected for the national recognition, his nomination kept female Penn students from being tapped — just like his national championship in the women’s 500-yard freestyle a few months earlier displaced his female competitors from the top of the winners’ podium.

After the controversial championship, NBC News was caught doctoring Thomas’s face to look less masculine.

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Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.

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