May 28, 2011 10:49 GMT  ·  By

Earlier this month, Barnes & Noble refused to sell copies of the magazine Dossier carrying on the cover a photo of shirtless androgynous model Andrej Pejic, on the grounds that it could confuse consumers into believing it was a woman. Pejic responds to the controversy, saying the photo was art.

As we also noted at the time, Barnes & Noble’s decision was seen as discriminatory because it singled out Pejic for his feminine features – the same features that have made him the hottest supermodel in high fashion right now.

In all fairness, the bookstore did say that it would sell the issue of Dossier if it was covered with a piece of plastic that wouldn’t show customers that the model was shirtless on the cover.

Still, censorship shouldn’t apply here, the Serbian-born Australian model says in a new interview cited by the Daily Mail: the cover for Dossier is art and not some explicit, exploitative image.

As such, it can’t possibly offend, he says.

“I think the question really isn’t the gender of the person on the cover,” Andrej says. “Clearly, it’s art, so art really should not be censored in a democratic society,” he adds.

“But even that, I think, is irrelevant. It’s art, so I don’t think it should be censored at all,” the model says.

Pejic has often addressed the issue of his feminine features: for a man who looks like a woman and works as model both for men’s and women’s clothes, one can expect it to pop up quite a lot.

He describes himself as a “gender-bender supernova” and even says that he sometimes feels a woman, and sometimes a man. There’s really nothing odd about it, he insists.

However, he understands why people would have a problem with his unique looks.

“I have just been named the 98th [hottest] woman in the world, so it makes the situation a little bit confusing for them,” he says in the same interview.