Women’s Running features trans woman on cover for first time
Women’s Running magazine will put a transgender woman on its cover for the first time.
33 year old Amelia Gapin will appear on the July 2016 cover. The runner has completed 7 marathons.
Gapin is a co-founder of MyTransHealth – a group set up to connect trans and non-binary people with doctors in the US.
Running helped Gapin with mental and emotional struggles during her transition, especially when she was coming out to her friends and family.
She told PEOPLE: “Running gave me a place to work through all of the external things, like dealing with other people, and how to approach coming out to people and how to explain. And when conversations didn’t go well – I lost friends because of it – running was a nice outlet for getting out some of that frustration.
For Gapin, appearing on the cover of a women’s magazine confirmed that trans women are being more and more accepted in the world.
“For me to be on the cover of a women’s magazine is kind of a sense of validation that other people are seeing transgender women as women.”
Jessica Sebor, editor in chief of Women’s Running said to USA Today: “What we really wanted to underline is every body, every person, every woman is welcome into the Women’s Running community and we just thought Amelia’s openness and embracing of her own identity was something that underlined that mission.”
“There are a lot of really unfortunate difficulties and challenges facing the trans community right now. What we hope is that they see there are many of us who stand in support and we want to show that support, and hopefully that provides a bit of comfort” she added.
Gapin joins Caitlyn Jenner and many other trans people that are being featured on magazine covers more regularly.
Caitlyn Jenner made a major movement for trans people when she appeared on Vanity Fair just over a year ago. More recently, the German branch of Men’s Health featured Ben Melzer on their cover in April.
