The Impact of Microaggressions on Transgender Identity Defense-related Emotions on the Emotional Status, Desire for Societal Engagement, and Participation in Suicide-related Behaviors in Transgender People

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dc.contributor.advisorMundy, Dean
dc.contributor.authorHowe, Bethany
dc.date.accessioned2019-09-18T19:32:46Z
dc.date.available2019-09-18T19:32:46Z
dc.date.issued2019-09-18
dc.description.abstractMost transgender people face microaggressions on a regular, even daily basis, causing an impact on the mental health of the person being aggressed against. Though research about these microaggressive impacts has increased in recent years, it still falls behind that conducted into other groups within the LGBTQ spectrum. In particular, it has failed to examine the damage done by microaggressions that deny a transgender person not only their identity, but their categorical existence. More, that research has largely failed to differentiate between proximal, interpersonal microaggressions and more distal, media-based microaggressions. Accordingly, this dissertation explores how both interpersonal and media-based microaggressions, particularly those that serve to deny a transgender person their identity, impact the emotional well-being of transgender people, including their willingness to societally engage and their likelihood of engaging in suicide-related behaviors. This research began with a nationwide Likert-style survey of 225 transgender people about identity-denying microaggressions in their daily life, allowing respondents to be scored from 1 to 7, with higher scaled scores indicating higher emotional impacts from identity-denying microaggressions. In-person follow-up interviews with 66 survey respondents were conducted across the United States to facilitate understanding why they responded the way to they do to the regular microaggressive incidents in their life. The survey data and the interviews reveal that the vast majority of transgender people do experience transgender identity defense-related emotions (TIDE). A new construct under the minority stress umbrella, those transgender people with higher scaled scores – TIDE scores – were found to have higher rates of societal disengagement, emotional withdrawal and engagement in suicide-related behaviors. Further, media-based microaggressions were, on average, more emotionally damaging than the same microaggressions occurring interpersonally.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1794/24954
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherUniversity of Oregon
dc.rightsAll Rights Reserved.
dc.subjectInterpersonal communicationen_US
dc.subjectMass Communicationen_US
dc.subjectMedia effectsen_US
dc.subjectMicroaggressionen_US
dc.subjectSuicideen_US
dc.subjectTransgenderen_US
dc.titleThe Impact of Microaggressions on Transgender Identity Defense-related Emotions on the Emotional Status, Desire for Societal Engagement, and Participation in Suicide-related Behaviors in Transgender People
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
thesis.degree.disciplineSchool of Journalism and Communication
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Oregon
thesis.degree.leveldoctoral
thesis.degree.namePh.D.

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