Beyond Transgender Representation: A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis of Transitivity in the British Press

Abstract

During the last two decades, the United Kingdom has witnessed legislative changes regarding the LGBT community, allowing people of the same gender to marry, and transgender people to obtain legal documents presenting their real name and gender. Additionally, “transsexualism” has been removed from the list of mental illnesses and has been labelled as medical condition instead. With these changes within the British society, the LGBT community has been a frequent topic of discussion in the media. The latter is the reason of this paper, which tries to reveal how a part of this community is represented in the British press, in particular, in a corpus of articles from different newspapers from January 2018 onwards. Bearing this in mind, attention will be paid to whether this representation is biased and what discriminatory viewpoints it endorses. For such a purpose, this Critical Discourse Analysis focuses on the patterns of TRANSITIVITY used by the journalists. Some metaphor analysis is also carried out on the corpus selected.