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Variety Magazine has announced the recipient of their 2026 Women of Power award.

And the award goes to…

You think you already know the punchline, don’t you?

These days, the winner of a women’s award is likely to go to… someone not a woman. It’s all so predictable.

But Variety Magazine has seen fit to add a twist this year.

Outside the Binary Box

They’ve given their Women of Power award to actress Emma Corrin… a woman… who says she’s not a woman. Or a man.

She enthusiastically accepted the award, telling those gathered:

I’m doubly honoured to be here tonight as the first non-binary recipient of the award. I think it’s crucial now more than ever that no matter how we identify, we are able to come together and support each other.

Actor Person Emma Corrin insists on being called they/them rather than she/her because they is non-binary.

So we are, apparently, dealing with a woman who is not a woman, receiving an award for women, in celebration of a category she does not belong to, but is also honoured to represent.

It makes perfect sense if you say it while standing on your head. Or if you’re the Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner. But I repeat myself.

Confusing Contortions

Here’s what I find so difficult to understand…

If you or I use the wrong pronouns in relation to a gender diverse person, it’s tantamount to committing a genocide.

And yet, if that same person decides that, for the purposes of a trophy ceremony, a red carpet, and much-needed publicity for an upcoming film, they are perfectly comfortable stepping temporarily into the category of “woman” in order to accept a Women’s award, then suddenly we are expected to be nothing but gracious, celebratory, and inclusive.

No contradiction is acknowledged. No irony is permitted. Just a gentle injunction that we all “come together and support each other.”

Which is, of course, the modern moral ecosystem in miniature: the rules are absolute, unless you need a loophole; the categories are sacred, unless they are inconvenient; and consistency is not so much a virtue as a kind of microaggression.

And so we are left with a world in which language is treated as both dangerously rigid and infinitely elastic, depending entirely on who is speaking, what they are receiving, and which direction the applause is coming from.

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Republished with thanks to The James Macpherson Report. Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.