Trans*rights and their Moralization: Analyzing Ten Years of Trans*debates in the US

Some have deemed recent developments in public trans* rights debates a “moral panic” and have argued that trans* rights issues are establishing themselves to be a new wedge issue in the US. Trans* rights, however, have been actively contested within legal institutions since the early 90s, and current observations about discourse development are limited to qualitative works. This paper aims to provide a quantitative look at the developments of trans* rights debates in the US. Specifically, it asks whether a) trans* debates became more moralized; b) parties underline the same moralized notion but use them in a different context. Using QTA methods (dictionary and word embeddings), I trace the use of moralized language within the last 10 years of US Senate debates. In line with recent scholarship on morality politics, the results indicate that parties tend to use similar moral notions (foundations), but they differ in who these moral notions target. The research is of interest to gender politics and morality politics scholars as it indicates the use of specific moralization elements (words and contents) across a large textual corpus.