The legacy media’s intensified negative coverage of trans identity since 2016 is widely recognized to have been a significant driver in the U.K.’s ongoing anti-trans moral panic (ILGA-Europe, 2024: 161; the United Nations, 2024), a period coinciding with a relatively sudden, growing public hostility to trans rights (BSA 40, 2023: 39), and an increase in anti-trans hate crime of 56% (Home Office, 2022). My chapter analyses the media framing of trans women as a public threat by focusing on the 2023 Isla Bryson case and the media’s amplification of the ‘trans sex predator’ narrative. Using content analysis and close textual reading, I draw on Nirmal Puwar’s concept of a ‘universal somatic norm’ for gendered bodies and, in subordination to it, a process of Othering that involves burdens of ‘doubt’ and ‘representation’ that shape the news coverage about trans women. My analysis demonstrates that three major newspaper outlets across the political spectrum, namely the Guardian, the Times, and the Mail, conflate the few available examples of trans sex predators to construct the hostile Othering of trans women, presenting them as posing a predatory threat in women’s spaces, with stigmatizing implications for trans women generally.
