The use of references in English printed media to refer to LGBT people

This study aims to investigate the references in English printed media that are commonly used to refer to the group of LGBT people, and also examine the aspects of references in English printed media used to portray their meanings towards LGBT people. The data were collected from NOW Corpus by selecting the first-100 concordance lines. In order to analyze the data, the researcher employed three groups of search words: favorable terms, unfavorable terms and non-gender specific pronouns to search for and analyze them by using descriptive percentage, thematic content analysis and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The findings revealed that the references which are commonly used in news and magazines to refer to non-binary people are transgender and trans, respectively. Also, there were sub-themes which emerged from the concordances for both favorable terms (transgender and trans) and unfavorable terms (transsexual and tranny) of the search words to refer to LGBT people with sarcastic or negative meanings and positive meanings. On the other hand, the gender neutral pronoun “hir” was equally found to be used with masculine type, feminine type and neutral type, while the non-gender specific pronoun “ze” was found to be more neutral than masculine, but no feminine type was found.