Students' Responses to a Transgender Person's Narrative: A Discourse Analysis.

In recent years, notions of gender fluidity and gender inclusion have replaced the conventional understanding of the dichotomy of gender due to an upsurge in studies on transgender people that seek to expand our conceptualizations about them. India's Supreme Court has given the third gender status to the transgender community in the country, advocating their inclusion in colleges and universities. However, little literature exists on how the mainstream students perceive and understand the transgender people. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by presenting a critical analysis of the responses of students to a text about a transgender person. Drawing on Fairclough's approach, it highlights how the students process notions about transgender people, sexual identities, and their roles. Most studies in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) neglect the role of text consumption, treating readers as passive and gullible. This paper argues against such notions by examining how transgender persons are discursively constructed through the students' responses and how the respondents analyze, support, challenge, and question the conditions of the transgender people, normative ideologies about gendering, and social practices at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]