Collective article record

“What’s Between Your Legs?” Is the New “So What Do You Do in Bed?”: Trans Issues In The Media

Collective Archive Number CAN-0000-0495-7E60 Permanent resolver

Source Summary

By Cathy Renna @cathyrenna Possibly inspired by Laverne Cox and Orange is the New Black, I blurted out the title of this post at a recent panel about media coverage of transgender issues, as I was trying to put into context the quality of coverage of transgender issues today, as compared to gay and lesbian issues in the early 1990s. It has stuck in my head since. Back then I was working at GLAAD and gay and lesbian people were still seen by the mainstream media as one-dimensional. They asked questions that directly related to or skirted around our sex lives, because that’s what they thought their audiences wanted to know. They were probably right, for the most part, and it took a lot of time, education and activism to get the media to cover gay and lesbian issues — and people — more substantively. For example, the coverage of

The Source Summary reproduces the first 150 words of the source article unless a Collective editor has explicitly locked a replacement.

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Interpretive context

Why this article may matter

Community significance

““What’s Between Your Legs?” Is the New “So What Do You Do in Bed?”: Trans Issues In The Media” may matter to community readers because it preserves a first-person or testimonial account connected to media, rhetoric, and discourse, while also engaging transgender identity and history. Such accounts can document how an issue was understood and experienced from within the period or community being discussed.

Historical significance

As a publication record from 2014 at Transadvocate.com, ““What’s Between Your Legs?” Is the New “So What Do You Do in Bed?”: Trans Issues In The Media” provides dated evidence of how media, rhetoric, and discourse was being argued in relation to transgender identity and history. Comparing it with earlier and later records can reveal changes in vocabulary, evidence, and emphasis.

Policy significance

The article’s strongest policy connection is criminal justice and public safety. It links that institutional frame to media, rhetoric, and discourse and transgender identity and history, making it potentially useful for tracing how an argument moves from description or history into law, regulation, administration, or public practice.

Content analysis

Ranked themes and framings

Rank 1 is the dominant inferred theme or framing. Parent labels identify broader theme families; the relationship key beneath the diagram explains the line styles used for hierarchy, same-family relationships, overlap, and separate-but-related themes.

Themes

1
Media, rhetoric, and discourseTheme family: Knowledge, history, and communication
100%
2
Transgender identity and historyTheme family: Identity, culture, and community
93%
3
Education and youthTheme family: Institutions, law, and public life
49%
4
Community and organizingTheme family: Identity, culture, and community
31%
5
Violence, safety, and dehumanizationTheme family: Power, ideology, and social conflict
13%
6
Race and intersectionalityTheme family: Power, ideology, and social conflict
9%

Academic framing

1
Qualitative and interview research
100%
2
Interpretive analysis
67%

Policy framing

1
Criminal justice and public safety
100%

Editorial function

Source topics

Relationship key

Overlapping themes
Separate but related themes

The diagram distinguishes hierarchy, same-family relationships, overlap, and separate-but-related themes inferred within this article. It does not assert that all themes are mutually exclusive.

These classifications are inferred from article text and source metadata and remain directly editable. Relationship labels express corpus-analysis judgments, not immutable facts.

Granular comparative context

How “Media, rhetoric, and discourse” appears across the Collective corpus

This article appeared 1 year(s) after the theme’s highest annual presence in the registered corpus in 2013.

Relative presence by year

Peak year indexed to 100

1 2004

3 2005

2 2006

23 2007

10 2008

9 2009

6 2010

34 2011

28 2012

72 2013

50 2014

13 2015

8 2016

17 2017

15 2018

6 2019

2 2020

3 2021

1 2024

1 2025

Presence by member publication

Frequently co-occurring concepts

Academic framings in this topic

Policy framings in this topic

Values measure relative presence in the registered Collective corpus, not public search interest or public opinion.

Inbound-link and citation evidence

Documented circulation and reception

1 source-held reference records an early link or citation; the documented sources span 1 domain. The dated evidence currently falls in 2014. These observations describe circulation and reuse; they do not assign cultural worth or evaluate the communities, arguments, or people discussed.

1distinct source records documented

1distinct referring domains

0best available scholarly cited-by count

0books or volumes documented

1references retained by the source publication

2014observed years in dated evidence

Evidence by channel

Independent counts; bars are not additive

Source-held references1

Coverage of the evidence search

Shows what has actually been checked

Publisher-held referencesChecked · August 31, 2026

Scholarly indexesChecked · August 31, 2026

Book and volume searchNotchecked

Public-web searchNotconfigured

Collective corpus linksIndexed · August 31, 2026

Review scholarly results Review book results Review public-web results

Documented references over time

Dated source evidence currently stored by the Collective

1 2014

Reference retained by the source publicationSource-publication recordProvider-confirmed

“What’s Between Your Legs?” Is the New “So What Do You Do in Bed?”: Trans Issues In The Media | TRANScending Borders

“What’s Between Your Legs?” Is the New “So What Do You Do in Bed?”: Trans Issues In The Media | TRANScending Borders · transcendingborders.org · April 20, 2014

[…] “What’s Between Your Legs?” Is the New “So What Do You Do in Bed?”: Tr… […]

Counts describe documented circulation and reception in the sources currently available to the Collective. They are not a score of quality, merit, popularity, or social value, and provider totals can overlap.

Article authors

Author profiles and related researchers

Guest

57 publications · 87 inbound sources/citations

Related authors in the Collective corpus

Cristan Williams

319 publications · 3,580 inbound sources/citations

Connected through 1 citation link between registered publications. Shares registered themes including Transgender identity and history, Community and organizing, Culture, identity, and representation.