The Bathroom Boogeyman |
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| Authors: | Shane M Graber |
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| Institution: | Journalism, University of Texas at Austin, USA. |
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| Abstract: | In 2015, Houston, Texas voters defeated a bill that would have expanded civil rights to previously unprotected groups, including transgender people. Using a critical framing analysis, this paper investigates how the city’s daily newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, covered the debate over the bill. As such, this study found that the newspaper used almost exclusively elite sources, provided almost no in-depth context, and employed four frames—Equality, Bathroom Boogeyman, Bureaucratic Process, and Religious Freedom—in its Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) coverage. Together, these elements aligned to form a daunting challenge to an effort to protect one of society’s most vulnerable groups: the transgender community. |
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| Keywords: | Bathroom Boogeyman equal rights framing transgender |
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