Rendering transgender identity in audio description

People who are visually impaired may listen to audio description (AD), an oral narration of non-verbal cues, a source of much-needed information in visual media. AD should faithfully translate images to text and avoid introducing inappropriate concepts. However, misleading media representation of transgender people still exists. For example, transgenderism may be confused with homosexuality in movies. Furthermore, “deadnaming”, i.e., calling a person by their “birth name” instead of their current name to deny their gender identity, is still common on the internet. Therefore, this research is conducted to study transgenderism portrayal in the AD of the Hong Kong film, Tracey (翠絲), and it compares this AD with that of the New Zealand film Rūrangi, which exhibits a gender-diverse cast, crew, and consultants.
It is found that the Tracey may fail to differentiate between gender and sexuality. Specifically, the AD narrates how the colour of the movie title changes from blue to purple to symbolise how the characters affirm their identities as trans women. However, purple is often used as a sign of homosexuality rather than transgenderism. In contrast, the AD of Rūrangi mentions the colours pink, white and blue, which are the colours of the transgender flag, to depict transgenderism. During the credits, Rūrangi’s AD only states the current names of the transgender characters, but Tracey’s (perhaps unintentionally) deadnames the transgender character by referring to both her birth name and current name.

(This project is partially supported by the GRF project CityU #11609621 and the project #9229103.)