Browsing by Author "Hukka, Reetta"

This thesis studies present-day discourses on transgender athletes in the English news media. It defines discourses as linguistic activities as well as social practices that are in a dialectic relationship with the material world. Discourses are seen as powerful tools for spreading ideologies, and news media is seen as an influential technology for producing discourses. The focus of this study is to investigate what types of meanings and definitions are linked to transgender athletes and what type of gender ideologies are behind these meanings. The method applied in the study is Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis. The material consists of articles published by three English newspapers: Daily Mail, The Guardian, and The Times. The articles were published in 2022, and report on or mention transgender athletes. The whole sample of 209 articles is first analyzed with corpus techniques and then a scaled-down sample of 69 articles is analyzed with Critical Discourse Analysis. The results show that the discourses on transgender athletes in the English news media largely follow already acknowledged patterns of reporting on transgender athletes and identities. These patterns rely on medico-legal definitions of sex/gender, where ‘biology’ and ‘science’ are used to argue for the binary sex/gender system. Transgender athletes are described as threats to fair competition and are seen to cause division and conflicts within the sporting world. A significant finding is also that transgender athletes are utilized to argue for gender segregation outside of the sporting world. Here, an underlining discourse that transgender women are essentially biological males is used to justify their exclusion from ‘women-only’ spaces. As a result, gender self-identification is portrayed as something dangerous and possible to exploit.