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The establishment of transgender and trans-sexual identities as a fact of social life, a has triggered a great deal of discussion on gender and sexuality. This issue has been making news since the media frenzy around transgender Christine Jorgensen’s arrival at New York airport in 1953, the media coverage of “shemales” and the Bois de Boulogne transvestites in the 1980s and 1990s, through to contemporary Internet pornography, creating confusion, divisions and competition on the ground. Drawing on the results of a study conducted from 2008 to 2012 and on audiovisual archives, this article shows the complex and interacting processes at work in the media construction of trans-identities.