Abstract
In recent years, trans identities have become the subject of intense sociopolitical and symbolic disputes in Spain and across Europe. This paper explores how such identities are constructed in parliamentary discourse between 2019 and 2024, focusing on debates held in the Spanish Congress of Deputies, the Spanish Senate, and the European Parliament. Grounded in a critical sociolinguistic and transfeminist perspective and adopting a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis (CACDA) methodology, the study analyses 479 parliamentary text excerpts that address trans-related issues, revealing how language in institutional contexts functions normatively and performatively.
The analysis identifies three dominant ideological frames (biologicist, victimist, and alarmist) mobilized across different political parties and legislative chambers. These frames are reinforced through specific grammatical strategies, including modal constructions, passive voice, impersonalization, and ironic quotation marks. Such linguistic features delimit the semantic boundaries of trans intelligibility and contribute to a normative grammar that privileges cisnormative ontologies. The study also examines how key discursive axes (identity, rights, childhood, education, and health) are strategically activated to legitimize or delegitimize trans existence in political discourse.
The findings indicate that parliamentary discourse acts as a regulatory apparatus that shapes the social and legal intelligibility of trans lives. Even seemingly inclusive interventions often reproduce logics of exceptionality and conditional recognition, reinforcing the very structures they purport to challenge. The article argues that these discursive dynamics constitute a regime of truth that governs which bodies are speakable, which identities are recognisable, and under what terms.
Keywords: critical discourse analysis, transphobia, ideological framings, trans linguistics, trans people
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