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Playboy Changes The Magazine’s Foundation With Transgender Playmate

(Photo by Robert Mora/Getty Images)

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It didn’t take long for Playboy to lose its identity now that Hugh Hefner is gone.

Playboy announced the first openly transgender Playmate Wednesday in the 64-year history of the popular pornographic magazine.

French model Ines Rau has posed for Playboy before, but it wasn’t until now that she became an official member of the Playboy team as the November Playmate. The magazine will feature her in the first issue since the death of Hefner, who will be on the cover.

It may come as a surprise to the fans of the Playboy founder’s work, but Hefner was a champion of the trans community and played a large part in putting Playboy’s first transgender model on the pages of his magazine back in 1991. However, it wasn’t until after his death that Playboy made Ines Rau their first ever transgender Playmate.

No matter how you feel about transgender issues or trans people themselves, it doesn’t change the fact that Playboy is a magazine that has catered to heterosexual males for decades.

Hefner was also a champion of the gay community, but he didn’t go publishing photos of naked guys in Playboy, did he? No, because that would ruin the very empire he built with beautiful women and a predominately male audience. So, why now have they decided to feature a man, who transitioned to become a woman, on the pages of their magazine as a playmate?

Perhaps this would’ve happened eventually even if Hefner was still alive, but that wouldn’t have changed the fact that the move goes against everything the popular magazine was built on.