Thai transmasculine individuals in online media and beyond: Social actor representation across Thai and international coverage

In contrast to Thai transgender women, Thai transgender men are observed to be under-researched. Focusing on the perspectives of Thai and international stakeholders such as media professionals and international organisations, this study employs Van Leeuwen (2008)'s framework to investigate how they utilise cyberspace to represent Thai transgender men. Methodologically, corpus-assisted discourse studies were employed. The corpus contained 194,325 words and spanned the years of 2011-2025. Findings indicate that Thai transgender men are portrayed as having agency in their gender identity while simultaneously suffering from discrimination on the grounds of it. Their body parts, especially genital organs, are also represented in a medicalised context. Additional issues that deserve more attention in the representation are proposed.