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Recent research on queer and trans students also documents environmental macroaggressions. For example, one study found that queer women generally felt unsafe and vulnerable as they encountered a campus environment with pervasive heteronormative assumptions that placed them under surveillance during everyday activities (Dimberg, Clark, Spanierman, & VanDaalan, 2019). In another study, trans participants reported being subjected to ciscentric, segregated, binary systems and structures across the university (Moody, Spanierman, Houshmand, Smith, & Jarrett, 2019). In summary, environmental macroaggressions permeate the norms, policies, and practices of various institutions. Consequently, these institutions may feel unwelcoming, alienating, hostile, and unsafe to targets from marginalized groups, thus creating the conditions for microaggressions to thrive.

D. W. Sue and colleagues (D. W. Sue, Capodilupo, et al., 2007; D. W. Sue & Capodilupo, 2008) have proposed a taxonomy of racial, gender, and sexual‐orientation microaggressions that fall into three major categories: microassaults, microinsults, and microinvalidations. All three forms may vary on the dimension of awareness and intentionality by the perpetrator, but they all communicate an overt, a covert, or a hidden offensive message or meaning to recipients. Because of the insidiousness of subtle forms of discrimination, microaggressive themes and much of the empirical research focus on microinsults and microinvalidations (Wong, Derthick, David, Saw, & Okazaki, 2014). ssss1 presents the categorization and relationship of racial microaggressions to one another. Although we focus here on racial microaggressions, the taxonomy applies generally to other microaggressions (e.g., gender and sexual‐orientation).

Microassaults are conscious, deliberate, and either subtle or explicit racial, gender, or sexual‐orientation biased attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors that are communicated to marginalized groups through environmental cues, verbalizations, or behaviors. They are meant to attack the group identity of the person or to hurt/harm the intended victim through name‐calling, avoidant behavior, or purposeful discriminatory actions (Miller & Garran, 2008; Nelson, 2006). Displaying a Klan hood, Nazi swastika, noose, or Confederate flag; burning a cross; and hanging Playboy bunny pictures in a male manager's office may all constitute microassaults that reflect individual expressions of environmental macroaggressions. The intent of these messages oftentimes is to threaten and intimidate. These messages make people feel unwanted and unsafe because they are deemed inferior, subhuman, and lesser beings who do not belong on the same levels as others in this society.