Research has shown that trans people experience disproportionate levels of discrimination, even when compared to cisgender LGB individuals. This mistreatment can have devastating impacts on mental health, employment, relationships, and even suicidality.
What has been less researched are the impacts of microaggressions on transgender individuals. Coined by Harvard University psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce in 1970, the term “microaggression” refers to “brief and commonplace” behavior that communicates “slights and insults” to a member of a minority group.
For trans people, common microaggressions might be misgendering, invasions of privacy, exoticizing trans people, and denial of realities such as transphobia, the pain of gender dysphoria, or a person’s gender identity. As we will see in the research, these experiences tend to be frequent, happening for many trans people on a regular basis.
The validity and even existence of microaggressions has been attacked by some researchers claiming that they perpetuate a victim mentality and may even be playing into individuals’ neuroticism. They say that the whole idea of microaggressions is just plain vague, and they even turn their frequency into a liability, saying that these are normal things that everyone experiences, with no specifically ill intent toward marginalized groups.
Those claims have been refuted. In particular, researcher and psychologist Monnica T. Williams made the important point that microaggressions can harm individuals regardless of intention, as they remind oppressed groups of their place on the lower rungs of society’s ladder of privilege:
Microaggressions are not simply cultural missteps or racial faux pas, but function as a form of oppression designed to reinforce the traditional power differential between groups whether or not this was the conscious intention of the offender. Consequently there is an underlying connection between the message embedded in the microaggression and its relationship to pathological stereotypes about the target that reify existing power structures.
Given the contention around the idea of microaggressions, researcher David Matthew Doyle and colleagues decided to see if he could measure the frequency and consequences of microaggressions commonly experienced by transgender people. His research demonstrates that microaggressions are indeed real and commonly experienced by trans people, and they do lead to negative mental health outcomes.
Doyle and his team broke down microaggressions into five major categories: denial of gender identity, misuse of pronouns, invasion of bodily privacy, behavioral discomfort, and denial of societal transphobia. They had 39 participants track their experiences of microaggressions and impacts on their mental health via daily diaries that each participant kept over a period of 10 days.
For Doyle et al. the impacts were clear—microaggressions were a frequent occurrence for trans people, with 3/4 of participants reporting at least one microaggression over the study’s 10-day period, and with misgendering being by far the most common one (72% of participants). These microaggressions were found to cause negative effects to mental health, as summarized here:
TGD people who tended to report a greater number of microaggressions across the diary period also tended to report greater gender dysphoria, more depressive and anxious symptoms, and lower self-esteem.
Drilling into the results, Doyle et al. found that denial of gender identity was specifically associated with depressive symptoms, while denial of societal transphobia was associated with anxious symptoms. Misgendering increased gender dysphoria, and denial of gender identity was associated with reduced self-esteem.
Doyle et al. speculated that future research might examine the impacts of microaggressions from specific individuals (e.g. family, intimate partners) and in specific domains (e.g. workplace, healthcare). A recent study by Daniel Cancela and colleagues looked at the latter, studying “emotional exhaustion of transgender and gender diverse employees” due to microaggressions.
To conduct this study, Cancela and colleagues recruited trans individuals vis social media and outreach to organizations on multiple continents, surveying them on their experiences with microaggressions in the workplace at a monthly interval for three consecutive months These surveys collected information on “microaggressions at work, emotional exhaustion, perceived social support, identity centrality, and identity pride.” Microaggressions included misgendering, deadnaming, use of transphobic slurs (not necessarily directed at participants), gossip, staring, inappropriate questions, lack of gender-neutral toilets, and barriers to changing information in systems.
As with Doyle’s study, Cancela found that misgendering was by far the most common microaggression, experienced by almost half of the study’s 59 participants, with “denial of privacy” (e.g. invasive questions, staring) occurring to roughly 1 in 6 participants.
Cancela et al. found that microaggressions caused increased rates of “emotional exhaustion,” defined as “feelings of being emotionally overextended and exhausted by one’s job.” Along with cynicism and inefficiency, emotional exhaustion is considered one of three dimensions of burnout—thus, microaggressions can push trans employees toward burnout, potentially threatening their employment and careers.
Taken together, the work of Doyle and Cancela provides ample evidence that microaggressions are quite real and impactful on transgender people. Unfortunately, Canela found that social support, identity centrality, and identity pride did not reduce the impacts of microaggressions, showing that they can be tenacious, even in the face of resilience practices. This just goes to show that, contrary to their name, they are not at all tiny in effects.
Clearly, more needs to be done to protect trans people. This might come in the form of institutional policies in domains such as workplaces or medical facilities to ensure that trans people encounter less harm when employed or pursuing medical care, and it also might come in the form of educational campaigns to help more cisgender people understand the harm they cause to trans people when making slights that they may perceive as minor, not intended to be harmful, and not particularly damaging. Such changes would be meaningful steps toward building a world where trans people could truly live in dignity and safety, and have a meaningful opportunity to thrive.
Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.
