“It’s like we are not human”: discourses of humanisation and otherness in the representation of trans identity in British broadsheet newspapers

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Abstract

This paper examines how transgender identity is represented across articles from three British national newspapers: The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph. Transgender identity has become a highly contentious issue in areas of western culture, especially Britain, and even within feminism itself, with heightened visibility leading to a backlash against the rights of trans people to protection, and even recognition, in law. However, the influence of the broadsheets, Britain’s so-called “quality” newspapers, in shaping the debate over transgender rights is under-researched. Using feminist critical discourse analysis (Michelle), I assess how the above newspapers position transgender subjects to alternatively legitimize or “other” transgender identity. Despite polarisation on issues of trans rights between newspapers, this paper finds that both “pro-trans” and “anti-trans” articles appropriate a feminist lexicon to define womanhood and gender in ways that justify their stance and foster division within wider society. I conclude that (white, cisheteronormative) feminism has become a vehicle for mainstream news media to further political agendas that can be crudely cast as either “progressive” or “conservative”.

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Montiel-McCann, C. S. (2023). “It’s like we are not human”: discourses of humanisation and otherness in the representation of trans identity in British broadsheet newspapers. Feminist Media Studies, 23(6), 2962–2978. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2022.2097727

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