By Alexandra García & Joshua Badge
In 2019, The Australian, one of the few remaining national newspapers in Australia, came under scrutiny because of its biased and harmful representation of transgender people. On social media, critics highlighted the use of alarmist headlines, misleading information and the exclusion of transgender voices. As one parent told ABC Media Watch, The Australian’s reporting felt like being bombarded by ‘outright harassment’ [at 4:40].
Though there is little research on media representation of transgender people or issues in Australia, research shows that media representation has an impact on individuals’ perception of their identities and society’s attitude towards them. Further, a recent Victorian study suggests that far-right groups exploit sensational reporting on gender and sexual diversity as an opportunity to recruit. This demonstrates the importance of accurate representation in mainstream media.
In this spirit, and motivated by a high number of complaints, the Australian Press Council released advisory guidelines for reporting on people with diverse sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics in November 2019. However, unlike the protocols for covering suicide or speaking with patients, the advisory guidelines are not binding. In practice, media outlets can publish nearly anything about gender and sexual minorities so long as it appears in the opinion section.
We decided to investigate how trans people and issues were represented in the Australian press by collecting a corpus of newspaper articles. While initially we focused on the coverage by The Australian in 2019, blatant cases of biased reporting in other outlets and after the release of the guidelines led us to significantly expand our corpus, including a further nine outlets. In addition to identifying patterns of representation of transgender people and issues, we also wanted to obtain a measure of the impact, if any, of the Press Council guidelines.
We used the Factiva database to collect all articles from any section published in the 10 most widely read outlets containing the words ‘trans’ and ‘gender’ and/or ‘transgender’ in the period from 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2020. We compiled a total of 1319 articles adding up to over one million words in our dataset, which we call TransCorp. Figure 1 shows that more than half of all articles come from only three newspapers, The Australian (333), The Herald Sun (226) and The Daily Telegraph (149), which are all subsidiaries of News Corp Australia. In our initial sample of 53 articles from The Australian published between April and October 2019, over 90% of the articles framed transgender people and issues negatively.
Recurring themes in these pieces include poorly supported claims on the ‘dangers’ of the transitioning process for children (e.g., ‘They are castrating children’), the imagined ‘erosion’ of women’s rights (e.g., ‘If anyone can be female, what happens to women’s rights?’), and the alleged ‘attack’ on freedom of speech for those who hold traditional beliefs about gender and sex (e.g., ‘Academic peers gag their own’). These themes were also identified as highly recurring in The Herald Sun and The Daily Telegraph.
As a starting point with the whole corpus, we identified R1 collocates of ‘trans’ and ‘transgender’ (Figures 2a and 2b).
This makes is clear that coverage tends to concentrate on trans women as opposed to trans men. In fact, the n-gram ‘trans* wom*n’ appears over four times as many as ‘trans* m*n’[i]. Concordance analysis shows a theme of concern over the participation of trans women in sports as being ‘problematic’, ‘unsafe’ and ‘unfair’, as seen in Figure 3.
A key word analysis[ii] revealed that in fact, ‘women’ is unusually frequent in this corpus, ranking eighth in keyness[iii]. Even though the selection criterion for the corpus is the presence of forms of the word ‘transgender’, over 2000 of the 2370 instances of ‘women’ refer not to trans but to cis women, who are typically portrayed as the victims of trans activism. An example is the 39 instances of the cluster ‘against women’, used to highlight the alleged sporting advantage of trans women, criticism of anti-trans feminists, and the hypothetical prospects of male violence in gender neutral toilets.
Given this predominantly negative portrayal of trans people, the question is whether the release of the Press Council advisory guidelines had any impact on this style of reporting. The answer is: not really. The number of articles did decrease by 37% in 2020, though this may have been caused by a shift in priority to the Covid-19 pandemic and related topics rather than the advisory guidelines. Only two newspapers, The West Australian and the Courier Mail, published a slightly higher number of articles in 2020.
However, the reduction in instances of problematic and derogatory language as listed in the GLAAD media reference guide is only 10 percentile points below from the previous year. These include over 300 instances of dead-naming (referring to an individual’s former name e.g., ‘Jane born John’), using unacceptable forms of ‘transgender’ (e.g., ‘transgenderism’, ‘transgendered’) and highly defamatory language which we will not reproduce.
We are only beginning to scratch the surface of trans representation in the Australian press. Although positive stories of trans celebrities are increasingly more common, there is still an alarming amount of fearmongering. Transgender people, particularly trans women, are amongst the most minoritised groups in our society. The media can play an active role in contributing to their empowerment or further harming them.
Notes
[i] Trans woman, transgender woman, trans women, transgender women, trans man, transgender man, trans men, transgender men.
[ii] We used ‘The Australian Corpus’, a corpus of over 12 thousand newspaper articles (nearly eight million words) from all Australian newspapers containing the lemma Australia* in 2016 compiled by researchers at Lancaster University
[iii] Log Likelihood is 3,076 where 99.99% significance is reached with a measure of 15.