ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I focus on misgendering through pronoun use through a case study of news reporting on Lucy Meadows. I collect two corpora of newspaper articles and use these to identify keywords – words that occur more frequently in the Lucy Meadows texts than might be expected from examining the collection of general news texts. I explore patterns of pronoun use in the media representation of Lucy Meadows, and argue that press misgendering can take more subtle forms than the reporter’s use of ‘using inappropriate pronouns or placing the person’s identity in quotation marks to dismiss the veracity of the subject’s identity’ (Trans Media Watch, 2011). Instead, I claim that reporters use quotations to evade direct responsibility for misgendering while continuing to produce the effect of undermining a transgender person’s gender identity.
