Carin Leibring Svedjedal: Being and Doing Transgender: Discourses on Gender and Trans Identities in Transgender People's Self-Chosen Designations and Swedish Media Reporting 2019–2023

Abstract

This dissertation examines discourses about gender and identity among transgender people. Defining a discourse as a linguistic construction of knowledge that is negotiated, established or positioned as taken for granted within a specific historical, social, cultural and societal context, I aim to analyze how discourses about gender and identity are shaped within and beyond the perspectives of transgender people, and how transgender identities are currently enabled or limited in Swedish society. I analyze two bodies of material in order to provide insights into gender and identity among transgender people in Sweden. Through mediated discourse analysis, I analyze transgender people’s self-chosen designations (first names and pronouns), and through critical discourse analysis, I analyze legitimizations of transgender-related topics in Swedish news media during 2019–2023. Both bodies of material are also analyzed in terms of their affective action, in order to give a broader perspective on how self-chosen designations and media texts can be understood in light of how discourses about gender and identity are created. 

The results show how discourses of gender and identity vary depending on whether they are constructed within or outside the group. This variation prevails in terms of the renegotiation of gender and identity and the societal view of gender. Within the group, the discourses, and renegotiations of gender, and the societal view of it adopt an individual and flexible perspective on what it means to be and do transgender, with mental gender in focus and room for renegotiation. Outside the group, however, the discourses, renegotiations and social views are instead governed by the framework of a so-called cisbinary matrix, in which biological gender is considered more or less synonymous with gender belonging, which ultimately limits renegotiations and makes them difficult, along with, to quote parts of the dissertation’s material, “new” views on gender (i.e. the idea that gender is based on a mental experience). Overall, the dissertation provides evidence of how transgender people, based on their individual perspectives on gender and identity, resist and renegotiate the conditions under which their experiences and identities can be accommodated alongside those of people who fall within the cisbinary structures.