Through Dominant Eyes: An Outline of the Representation of Transgender People in Dutch Written Media of 2018
Summary
This thesis aims to explore and outline the representation of transgender people in Dutch written media of 2018. This thesis has looked at the roles and intersecting identities of trans people. I have labelled all articles about trans people and the transgender community via the software ‘Meltwater’, and labelled the articles with tags, in order to collect data. I then analysed the data and looked for irregularities and patterns. In the analysis, I present the articles in four themes: discrimination, emancipation, transition and work. Within these four themes, the most prevalent outcome was that Dutch written media show quite a one-sided story of a trans person, namely the story of a young, white trans woman who is either successful or a victim who has gone through a medial and physical transition. The older, trans man of colour is more absent. This thesis also includes four in depth analyses of articles that have appeared in Dutch media in 2018 and are either very typical for other articles, or different than what normally appears in the media. It is important to look at the representation of transgender people, since the Dutch written media play a role in the emancipation of transgender people, and a truthful representation will benefit the transgender community. This is also something that will be presented in the theoretical framework, where I explain three key concepts of my argument, namely representation, stereotyping and intersectionality.