Meaning Representations of “Trans”, “Transgender”, “Transsexual” and “Tranny”: A Corpus-Based Analysis in Digital News and Magazines

Abstract

The aim of this present study is to examine the English references in digital media that are commonly used to refer to the group of non-binary people and to explore the aspects of references used to portray their meanings towards LGBT people. The first-100 concordance lines of NOW Corpus were used as a main source of data. In order to analyze the data, two groups of the nodes: favorable terms (transgender and trans) and unfavorable terms (transsexual and tranny) were searched and analyzed by using descriptive percentage, thematic content analysis and corpus-driven discourse analysis. The findings revealed that the highest frequencies of references commonly used in digital news and magazines to refer to LGBT individuals are transgender and trans, respectively. Besides, two sub-themes were found in the concordance lines in terms of positive meanings: raising equality, showing advocacy and performance, and politics and policy and sarcastic or negative meanings: showing bias or discrimination, subgroup, abandonment and insecurity, difficulties and oppressions and derogatory and sexual desire. It can be concluded that some unfavorable terms are still underused in media, but they could reveal some positive meanings in terms of politics and policy. The implementations of study are that the meanings of some LGBT terms are dynamic, and that when used in media, content writers need to be aware of different meanings and contexts of the words.