Containing Gender Outlaws, Stigmatizing the Left: Transphobia and Cisgenderism in the Thatcher-era Daily Mail (1979–1990)

Abstract

This article analyses the formation of cisgenderist and transphobic discourses in the reporting of the Daily Mail during the Thatcher era (1979-1990). It explores the emergence of a discursive strategy that focused on the containment of forms of gender expression that the socially conservative newspaper saw as a threat to the normative understandings of gender that it cherished. At the same time, it discusses how the paper managed the tension between its desire to contain and marginalize these individuals existed and its need to fetishize them for the purposes of commercial and political gain. It ties its reporting on trans people to other important trends in conservative politics, including the moralistic campaigns of Mary Whitehouse to regulate television broadcasting, and the forms of political homophobia that appeared under the government of Margaret Thatcher.