Constructing deviance and carceral harm: Australian news media representations of trans people in the criminal legal system

Background and Aim Media representations shape public understandings of whose safety, dignity, and wellbeing are recognized within carceral systems. This study examined how publicly available Australian news media represented trans and gender diverse people who had been charged with, convicted of, or otherwise involved in the criminal legal system.Methods We analyzed 254 publicly available Australian news articles published between 2013 and 2023 using a two-stage mixed-method design. Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling was used to map recurrent linguistic clusters across the corpus, followed by qualitative content analysis of 43 articles with the strongest model-estimated associations with the topics selected for further analysis. Analysis attended to textual, visual, and affective framings, including language use, pronoun practices, sensationalism, pathologisation, and the positioning of institutional and expert voices.Results Three interrelated themes were identified: identity construction, experiences of the criminal legal system, and differential treatment of trans people in carceral contexts. Media coverage frequently positioned trans identity as inherently newsworthy, deviant, deceptive, unstable, or dangerous. Trans women and transfeminine people were disproportionately represented, while trans men, transmasculine, non-binary, and other gender diverse people were largely absent. Even where articles addressed institutional harms, trans people’s experiences were often mediated through police, corrections, family members, advocates, or victims rather than centered through first-person accounts.Conclusions Media representations form part of a wider ecology in which trans people’s safety, health, gender recognition, and access to care are publicly imagined and debated. Importantly, trans identity is not a predictor of dangerous or criminal behavior; media representations that conflate trans identity with criminality risk reinforcing harmful stereotypes.