Who's the 'real' transgender? : The representation and stereotypingof the transgender community on YouTube
Abstract
The article aims to provide an analytical introduction to the ways of representation of the transgender minority in new media. Through a rhetorical analysis of the selected content related to two high-profile transgender YouTubers, we identified five building blocks of the given discourse: reduction of a structural problem to a personal one, reduction of a person's reality to feelings, tokenization, psychiatrization of transgender identity, and ingroup gatekeeping.
These aspects of the discourse function as a limiting and formative force for the media representation of what is considered to be a transgender identity and transgender experience in a given discourse. Therefore, transgender people are rendered unable to express their own experience as it is stereotyped beforehand through the structure of the debates and interviews and media representation in general.