The Right To Be Ourselves": A Study into the Language of Transgender Identities

This presentation aims to explain the linguistic identity markers of being a transgender person, through the data of Louis Theroux’s documentary, Transgender Kids. There are three broad catagories through which a person can express their transgender identity: Coming Out, the process of first introducing the new identity to other people; Social Transition, the process of changing people’s social perceptions of gender and identity; and Medical Transition, the process of physical change. This presentation does not assume a fixed identity for all transgender people that follow these three channels, but instead seeks to introduce concepts which are usually familiar to transgender people to a larger audience.