'Woman' assaulted underage girl with sex toy: Representation of transgender Singaporeans in newspapers

This paper uses Judith Butler’s notion of “regulative discourse” to investigate newspaper representations of two transgender Singaporeans: Mr. Z (a transman) who was arrested for sexual assault against a female minor in... [ view full abstract ]

This paper uses Judith Butler’s notion of “regulative discourse” to investigate newspaper representations of two transgender Singaporeans: Mr. Z (a transman) who was arrested for sexual assault against a female minor in 2014, and Ms. EFH (a transwoman) who requested political asylum in the UK in 2016 to avoid compulsory military service as a man in Singapore. Stemming from the belief of an ontological core, regulative discourse polices the “sexual ordering of gender” by prescribing normative possibilities of sex, gender, and sexuality.  Because transgender people do not conform to these possibilities, they are deemed non-normative within this limiting framework.  Our analysis shows how regulative discourse influences the ways in which journalists report on transgender people, which in turn reaffirm the regulative discourse in Singaporean society.

In Singapore, the effects of regulative discourse on transgender people are modulated by biological sex and other factors.  Singaporean newspapers accept Ms. EFH’s self-identified gender more readily than Mr. Z’s.  They employ several linguistic means to portray Ms. EFH as a credible woman and Mr. Z as a fake man.  First, while the news reports overwhelmingly reject Mr. Z’s self-identified gender by labeling him a woman/female (66%) and by using female pronouns (92.2%) to refer to him, their acceptance of Ms. EFH’s self-identification is evident in their predominant use of female pronouns (99.6%) and their description of her as a woman/female (47.8%) in most contexts.  Second, in news reports about Mr. Z, quotation marks are used for expressions like husband, wife/wives, and married to challenge his manhood and delegitimize his relationships.  In addition, journalists’ occasional use of quotation marks around woman when describing Mr. Z highlights his non-normativity and suggests that he is not only less of a man but also less of a woman.  Such use of quotation marks is absent in news reports about Ms. EFH.  Third, news reports identify Mr. Z (but not Ms. EFH) as someone afflicted with gender dysphoria whose gender presentation is always suspect.  They use verbs like pose and disguise to describe his actions, thereby implying his intention to deceive others of his “real” gender identity.