Becoming Un/Silenced: Whose Voices Are Heard in Media Coverage of Gender-Diversity in Australian Schools and Drag Story Time?

Through a new materialist inquiry, as a bounded review, we cartographically and diffractively read/plot media reports about genderdiverse, transgender and non-binary (GDTNB) students in education in Australia. We utilise diffractive analysis to explore the complexities of these representations, revealing how exclusions shape the public discourse around GDTNB people and why these exclusions matter in line with Barad's agential realism theory. Further, diffractions map where the effects of differences appear, how differences are produced, how they matter, and the entangled effects these differences make. Thus, we seek out exclusions, differences and entanglements. Our inquiry creates a cartography mapping into ways GDTNB children materialise within the educational structures, media society and systems of which they are compulsorily enrolled. To set the scene, we discuss public debate on matters relating to children and gender diversity. We cartographically and diffractively analyse 117 mainstream media articles on gender diversity in schools and Drag Story Time in council libraries from 2021 to 2023, to locate what matters in public discourse on gender diversity, the silences, along with what is entangled and what diffracts. By entering identified relevant media titles and content into Voyant Tool's Knots Tool, most frequently used words and their relation to each other present entanglements and diffractions to consider as we identify patterns and gaps in media discourse. It became repeatedly visible that conservative politicians who have no authority on gender diversity dominate media airplay on gender diversity and schooling and Drag Story Time for young children. Our analysis illustrates that coverage is often dominated by conservative political narratives and which pathologise GDTNB students or depict them as vulnerable rather than affirming their identities. The silences, differences and disentanglements point to the need for public education on the lived realities of gender diversity along with proactive counter-storying to folk devil narratives of transfolk.