Anti-trans discourse in the British press: analysis of intersubjective biases in Daily Mail headlines

Abstract

The debate around trans rights is currently attracting a great deal of political and media attention in the European context. In the last five years, many countries have debated in their parliaments laws related to gender self-determination, trans children or legal procedures for sex change. Most Western European countries have paved the way for gender self-determination, while Eastern European countries are still reluctant. While the Transgender Europe (TGEU, 2024) report notes that the approach to trans people has advanced positively, it also notes a considerable increase in anti-trans backlash from some governments and conservative media. In the rankings conducted by the TGEU body, the UK scores one of the worst in Western Europe in 2024 (15.25 out of 32). The purpose of this paper is to study the discourse of one of the main British newspapers; to do so, it analyzes the 642 headlines published by the Daily Mail -the second most read newspaper on the Internet in the United Kingdom- on the trans issue during the second half of 2023. The research takes as its theoretical framework Halliday's (1994) Systemic Functional Linguistics and Martin and White's (2005) valuation theory to carry out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the intersubjective and ideological biases underlying the discourse. The results of the study show that most of the headlines contain discriminatory biases.