Transgender and transsexual people’s sexuality in the media Karine Espineira A longstanding concern voiced by trans groups and their most public figures is to ‘change the image of trans in society’– a concern expanded since the 2000s by a wish to ‘change the image of trans in the media’. 1 For decades, as a means to protect themselves from being incorporated into cabaret, prostitution or pornography by the media, people self-identifying as transsexual have forbidden themselves any form of sexuality. 2 As for people who recognize themselves as transgender, they only experienced media cov- erage, confessional [confidentielle] and contentious, later. If transsexuals seem to have succeeded in shedding their sexuality, transgender people saw them- selves dispossessed of their gender and loaded with sexuality; something which seems to have partially rendered invisible their critiques of the gender order, of binaries and of sexism. Media paradigms have had an impact in the field, creating confusion, division and competition. In order to shed light on the interrelated processes of over-sexualisation and desexualisation of trans identities, the findings of a participant observation carried out between 2008 and 2012 (focussed on trans identity organizations and cooperatives) and analyses of two audiovisual archives will be drawn upon. 3 Trans modes of naming and identification In the French context, the prefix ‘trans’ has been associated with the suffix ‘identity’ since the 2000s, having being associated in an international context with sexuality (transsexuality) since the 1950s and with gender (transgender) since the 1970s. Thus the term ‘trans identity’ [transidentité] is an umbrella term under which transsexual and transgender people as well as alternative trans identities recognize themselves. It coexists with the prefixes trans or trans* [trans’], the use of these abbreviations marking the reversal [retourne- ment] of stigma. 4 These terms and prefixes, products of community circles and trans identity militancy, are now public knowledge thanks to the increas- ing mediatisation of trans lifestyles since the 1970s. The public is probably less familiar with the identity positions that can be mapped through acronyms and their run-offs. The acronym MtF means male to female, translated into French as ‘homme vers femme’ (and not ‘mâle vers Ó 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group