Neopronouns or trolling?

Question

It’s the 112 rep question: Am I looking at someone’s legitimate pronouns or trolling?

(It’s unfortunate I have to ask, but this is just where we are right now.)

I’ve seen “my pronouns are [insert ridiculous fake stuff here]” trolling recently (in posts) when before I never did. Also stuff that looks to be trolling, but could also maybe not be. Trolls deserve red flags while everyone else specifying pronouns does not, right?

(To clarify, the problem is not just about not wanting to use a troll's words. The purpose of some of this trolling is to try and convince people that transgender people—or their neopronouns—are stupid or unreasonable. Ignoring the trolls allows us to avoid the first problem, but not the second since it allows them to still reach people with their message, which is not something that I want to see promoted.)

Some neopronouns are clearly legitimate. Some trolling is clearly trolling. But unfortunately there’s a big grey area where it’s not clear to me what is what.

Does anyone have a good method for dealing with this? There just doesn’t even seem to be a good way to ask about someone’s specified pronouns in such a way that doesn’t sound insulting if the user isn’t trolling.

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Note: A while ago, I did some research on neo-/third person pronouns which can be found here. There are several important things I found:

• There are more neopronouns than I could ever hope to keep track of
• The most popular neopronouns are very uncommon. On the other end of the spectrum, it looks like some neopronouns are neologisms used by a single person
• Some neopronouns come from unlikely places, such as SciFi

Answer 1

Does anyone have a good method for dealing with this?

No.

It's a catch-22.

If you say someone is trolling and they aren't, then you're guilty of being insensitive, yet, at the same time it can be (ab)used by some users to enforce ridiculous (again, me calling it ridiculous can be problematic too) pronouns.

To quote Cesar M regarding this exact issue:

I can't give you a definitive answer because it will depend on case by case.

Conversely, this is also what's causing a lot problems recently.

Who can really judge someone's motivations, especially over the Internet.

Answer 2

The two are not mutually-exclusive.

But unfortunately there’s a big grey area where it’s not clear to me what is what.

The essence of a successful troll lies in that grey area. If I show up on your Harry Potter fan site and my first post is "HARRY POTTER SUXX!", that's probably just going to get me banned. If I post "My favorite Harry Dresden character is Gandalf!" I might get a few bites - there's a small chance I'm just really clueless. But if I jump into a discussion of Merlin with an encyclopedic knowledge of Le Morte D'Arthur, then I might be able to string you along for a good while before you realize that I have no knowledge of nor interest in Harry Potter's Merlin... And if I'm really good, I'll be able to get the entire forum arguing over it before you catch on that this is my real intent. Doubt and ambiguity are fertile soil for trolling...

...and also a staple element in English, where one word should never have just one use, nor one meaning limit itself to being expressed by one word, nor are there any practical limits on how many new words we might create or borrow. Think you're gonna make up a fake word just to troll pedantic readers? Joke's on you - now it's in the dictionary! English might be named after the Angles, but it's the native tongue of the troll.

In short, if you think you're gonna protect yourself from getting trolled by carefully excluding words that are meant to troll you... Congratulations, you just got trolled!

Answer 3

People who use neopronouns are rare. People who use neopronouns for identification rather than as a substitute for "singular they" or "generic he" are even less common. Trolls are common. If you assume that everyone who asks you to use neopronouns is a troll, basic statistics says you won't be far wrong.

Unfortunately, the Code of Conduct requires you to assume the opposite.

Answer 4

When my kids were young and could hardly read the instructions of a (board) game they would make up the rules and start playing. If during the game they would find a loophole in their rules they would modify or add rules.

To someone who knew the rules this could be very confusing, entertaining, and every now and then, it would be infuriating. In their own world of rules they were happy and content. That happiness would be threatened only by outsiders who didn't understand their rules and were mixing them up with the official rules, by outsiders who would immediately see the loophole and would use them and by themselves if one of them would find a loophole and exploit it before mentioning it.

In order to enjoy the game with others they had a couple of options: adopt the official rules, enforce their own rules, or inform the outsiders of their take on the game and agree on a new mix of amended rules that would make the game fun and playable for everyone.

So far I have been interpreting the new CoC and 'list' of pronouns as an attempt to make a good mix that make the game fun and playable for everyone. From time to time it felt as if the new rules were enforced and that made me feel uncomfortable because I did not understand them but I assumed good faith.

There is no way of telling if the rules are any good yet; the proof is in the playing and there is no guarantee that they have no loopholes that can be exploited. I am pretty sure that there are loopholes and that they will be exploited. Perhaps that is needed to make the game playable and fun for everyone by adjusting while we play.

So, let's play, allow the trolls to point out the loopholes, make the rules better while we go.

Extra: I am not sure yet whether or not I still like the game with the new rules in effect. I am not sure I will continue playing. The last couple of months there were times that the negotiations about the new rules were so distracting that I decided to not get involved at meta level and would stick to the actual content of Q&A. In the end I will vote with my feet: I will stay or walk.

Answer 5

I think the correct answer is to assume people aren't trolling, unless really proven otherwise. Satisfying trolls by using their made up pronouns is less of a problem than ignoring someone's legitimate preferences.

Trolls will eventually get bored and move on to something else. No lasting harm. People who were misjudged as trolls, on the other hand, will remember how they were treated.

From a conversation with CesarM (discussing removing a mention of otherkins):

Athari: I'm a party of furry community. Some of us do have preferences on how to be called in third person and it goes beyond pronouns, like disliking "human". There're more transgenders than furries (?) and transgenders are part of LGBTQ+, so their voices are heard, but other people have preferences too. I find it unacceptable that only one marginalized group is supported, including enforcing group-specific rules, but all others are explicitly excluded, to the point of removing any mentions of them from posts.

CesarM: Your stated pronouns will be respected just any other under this policy, the question was removed merely because it is already covered by the policy.

Assuming the interpretation of the policy hasn't changed, this means that a really wide variety of pronouns is accepted. It's absolutely impractical for a single person to remember all of them, so assuming good intentions is really the only way.

Answer 6

Use your common sense. There's another list here and while it's not exhaustive, the pronouns there are all short words bearing some kind of similarity with the common pronouns, he/she/they.

I’ve seen “my pronouns are [insert ridiculous fake stuff here]” trolling recently (in posts) when before I never did.

Those posts are worthy of being mod-flagged, maybe even rude/abusive as we normally do for trolls. The current situation is hard enough already without pranksters.

But unfortunately there’s a big grey area where it’s not clear to me what is what.

Yes, I feel that with the current version of the Code of Conduct it's inevitable. The simplest option might be just to stop participating and move on.

Answer 7

It is a mistake that the answers to Q9-Q11 in the official FAQ describe obligatory use of another's preferred pronouns, including (exotic) neopronouns.

We need to carefully consider in what way the refusal of using a particular pronoun is to be considered as not recognizing another's self-identity.

Then it matters in which way we regard the neopronouns.

• Neopronouns are: alternative pronouns to refer in a neutral way to gender/identity.

  in which case substitution by any other pronoun, particularly the widely accepted pronoun 'they' should be fine. (and one may argue that any other way to write in a gender neutral way, like avoiding pronouns, should be acceptable as well)

• Neopronouns are: alternative pronouns to refer in a non-neutral way to alternative genders/identities.

  in which case anything goes, including a troll gender/pronoun as 'attack helikopter'.

When I browse through lists of neopronouns, I see that neopronouns are mostly like the first type. They relate to alternative ways of neutral expression, but they do not relate to a more specific self-identity (at least not an identity that would not be recognized or overridden by using an alternative term for the same identity).

It seems to me that we can use these pronouns interchangably and a lot of trouble and confusion can be avoided when the preferred pronouns are made optional rather than obligatory. The point of the neopronouns (most of them) is to refer to someone in an 'identity-neutral way' and not in a 'specific way' (like masculine/feminine gender, or any other form).

I believe that, for the sake of making social life on the forum/Q&A easier, we should not go towards the direction of making up a large list of words/pronouns for every possible alternative gender and requiring that these should be used on an equal footing as 'he' and 'she' whenever they are requested to be used as such.

It is already difficult enough to move the use of language towards a more gender neutral direction. And now we are going to make this process more diffult by introducing more ways to be not neutral in terms of specific neopronouns?

Answer 8

That's likely not a problem because pronouns are used rarely anyways. I read that only one in about 150 contributions uses pronouns. That means that trolls will have a very boring life tricking you into using pronouns without actually caring about them.

Even if trolls were to make up something like 10% of the active userbase, you would only need to be concerned about the grey area of stated pronouns that could be genuine, so you would probably have to make thousands and thousands of contributions until such a case arrives. In such a case I would just make a personal best judgement (trolling or not trolling) and let the moderators deal with any potential fallout, good or bad.

The only real current impact of trolls is polluting their contributions with fake announcements about their preferred pronouns. On meta.stackoverflow they are currently discussing classifying this as spam, and with regard to trolling it certainly is. Hopefully the company concurs and changes course in this regard (in the current FAQ they explicitly allow this form of trolling).

Later there was an update to the CoC and the FAQ and pollution of contributions in this regard by trolls is now not possible anymore.

Answer 9

My only comment on this is: make sure that the difference between something used in the nominative / accusative and vocative is really evident.

Pronouns should be used in the nominative / accusative case since they have actual grammatical functions in the sentence (subject and / or object, depending on your sentence), and in the vocative cases you can just use the username instead of a trolling "pronoun" (which is not a pronoun, is a title or vocative expression)

For example:

user1234 states that their preferred pronoun is "xe / xir" (an actual neopronoun, replaces "he / she" and "him / her", and overrides the singular "they")

When talking about xir, we should phrase it like that. Xe stated that xir preferred pronouns are those. (nominative / accusative)

When talking to xir, we should just use "you" or @user1234 (vocative)

user1234 states that their preferred pronoun is "Great Killing Machine" (this is not a pronoun, this is a title. Like "Mr", "Ms", "Dr.", "Ma'am", "Sir", "Your Majesty" or something in that sense)

When talking about them, we should phrase it like that. They didn't present us with a preferred pronoun, so we're free to use the singular "they" since it is what most of us are defaulting to when needing to refer to a gender-neutral third person.

When talking to them, we just use the @user1234 if you don't want to indulge them on the nonsense. It is actually easier to do so because the system will recognize the user handle.

Answer 10

When you meet someone and they wear a suit and tie, how do you know the dress is part of their identity (e.g. working as a banker or going to a wedding) or just a costume for a party?

You don't, but you treat that person politely and do not begin to discuss whether their dress seems appropriate to the occasion for you.

Do the same when you encounter pronouns.

The whole point of the present changes in society is to allow people to choose how they want to live. If someone wants to play baseball or have sex with a person of the same sex, there is no reason for anyone to oppose this self expression and threat them with anything less than respect and kindness.

And it doesn't matter what the motivation behind these actions is.

It doesn't matter whether someone has gay sex because they are gay, or just do it to shock their mom. It doesn't matter whether someone wants to be called a specific pronoun because that is their identity, or because they want to see what happens.

It is not my place to question the motives of other people.

If a troll meets respect and kindness, trolling will lose the reward of causing an uproar.

Answer 11

When someone states their pronouns, the default should be to respect that and use the given pronouns.

The exception is when those pronouns are malicious and/or in direct violation of the Code of Conduct. For example a slur, a bigoted meme, etc.

Maybe a troll will come by and request "espgkj" as pronoun, but so what? There's no harm in using it, and if everybody simply uses it (or ignores the troll) instead of makes a fuss about it, trolls will gain nothing from the whole thing and get bored (or become more explicit, violate the CoC, and be banned).

Answer 12

This is not a new problem. Trolls have always sought to appear to not be trolls. The classic example is the concern troll, who pretends to be genuinely concerned about an issue but is in fact trying to cause disruption.

There has never been a good solution to this and there probably never will be. We just have to deal with it on a case-by-case basis. You can't lawyer every situation with specific rules.

Answer 13

There's a list actually.

Neopronouns or trolling? ... Does anyone have a good method for dealing with this?

If it seems weird to you, and the post seems provocational, it's probably Trolling. However, to be extra sure check on this list of neo-pronouns (Wikipedia). That should cover it. edit: Or the list Glorfindel linked to. Now, I'm not saying any of these lists are perfect, definite, or impervious to tampering, but - they should be good enough for a double-check.

Personally I think most of that xir/zhe/whatever is a fad and will go away (unlike non-binariness, which is not a fad and won't go away), but, you know - let's not give Fullerton and Chipps something to beat us over the head with.

Answer 14

Does anyone have a good method for dealing with this? There just doesn’t even seem to be a good way to ask about someone’s specified pronouns in such a way that doesn’t sound insulting if the user isn’t trolling.

As long as you feel comfortable please assume good intent and use their pronouns. If you think they are trolling, disengage.

This has been said a dozen times already, but I'll add to that:

Flag when you suspect a troll.

Just flag any of their posts or comments with a custom mod-flag and explain your concerns. Then let the moderators or staff deal with it. It was told somewhere they were trained on this subject, thus they should be better equipped than us regular Joe's (or Jane's). When the trolling (in a post or comment) is really obvious use a rude or abusive flag. Enough of these will see a post deleted without moderator intervention.

Answer 15

Am I looking at someone’s legitimate pronouns or trolling? I think it's useful to remind ourselves of the fundamentals, then build on those.

• What is a pronoun?
• What is gender?
• What is a troll?
• Why are we even talking about pronouns?
• What have pronouns got to do with bigotry, gender and sexual orientation?
• How can a request to use a pronoun be used to troll?

What is a pronoun?

A pronoun is a short, convenient word of a language used (as a noun-phrase) in place of a longer word (a noun) or group of words (a noun-phrase). If I am talking to you about the green apple in the blue bowl to the left of the vase, it is inconvenient for me to repeatedly say or write "the green apple in the blue bowl to the left of the vase", and I will use the pronoun "it" instead.

The (nominative) pronouns of traditional English, I/you/he/she/it/we, are short to write and say (monosyllabic) and are distinct from words use for other purposes. They are clearly pronouns and not names of things (nouns), descriptive words (adjectives or adverbs) or actions (verbs), so understanding the structure (parsing) of a sentence that contains them is easy.

What is gender?

Gender is

the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity

The subject here is gender. That is not the only way that people can be differentiated, but it is the relevant criteria in this discussion about gender pronouns in English. Other languages have grammatical gender (noun classes) based on other characteristics, such as human/non-human, but that is not relevant here.

What is a troll?

A troll

starts quarrels or upsets people... to distract and sow discord by posting inflammatory [and other] messages... with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses and normalizing tangential discussion

Note that a troll need not be explicitly offensive, or even untruthful. They key is that they deliberately attempt to inflame or provoke.

Why are we even talking about pronouns?

The new Code of Conduct says

No bigotry. We don’t tolerate any language likely to offend or alienate people based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion — and those are just a few examples. Use stated pronouns (when known). When in doubt, don't use language that might offend or alienate.

With the new sentence "Use stated pronouns (when known)" being the key addition. Our concern here is that a statement of pronouns to use might be a troll rather than a genuine request.

But let us look at the context of that sentence.

• It is in a section about bigotry. A troll will be motivated by actual bigotry or a desire to be inflammatory by saying something a bigot would say.
• It is bracketed by sentences about offensive or alienating language. A troll will say something that is calculated to offend.
• The context is evidently gender and/or sexual orientation (more of this below).

What have pronouns got to do with bigotry, gender and sexual orientation?

This is an unfortunate accident of the English language.

• Despite English having eliminated the grammatical gender present in its earlier form, it retains grammatical gender in its third-person pronouns, he/she/it (and his/hers/its/him).
• In traditional English discourse it is considered rude to misgender someone using a third-person pronoun. Proper pronoun use is not rude or insulting. Referring to a man or a woman as "it", or a woman as "he" is rude.
• The traditional English third-person pronouns recognize only two kinds of gender, male and female.
• We now recognize that gender is more complicated than that simple binary classification.

So, a troll can start a quarrel or upset someone by deliberately misgendering someone: by saying "he" instead of "she", for example. They can do that even if they use a traditional pronoun (by misusing it). We live in a society in which alienating sexist attitudes such as "woman can't and shouldn't be programmers" are still present. A troll might start a quarrel or upset people by deliberately saying "he" when referring to an evidently female programmer. They reason that can start a quarrel or upset people is because it carries the implication that "woman can't or shouldn't be programmers". We live in a society in which alienating transphobic attitudes such as "someone who was born with male anatomy and was assigned a male name at that time but who calls themselves she does not deserve any respect". A troll might start a quarrel or upset people by deliberately, rudely, referring to someone as "he" because they have a male name despite that person sating they want to be referred to as "she".

The simple rule added to the Code of Conduct, to "Use stated pronouns" clearly indicates that those kinds of trolls are unacceptable, when the stated pronoun is a traditional gendered pronoun (he/she).

The further complication is people who do not have a gender that can simply be described as male-like (he) or female-like (she). Because the rules of polite English discourse already consider it rude to deliberately misgender someone, someone with a gender like that might consider it rude to use any of the traditional gendered (third-person) pronouns. Various communities of those people have therefore coined various new pronouns (neopronouns) to use for their gender. Others have suggested using the existing pronoun they. But because no consensus has yet emerged (as part of normal English usage) on what pronouns to use for these people, we have a confusing set of proposals. The Code of Conduct attempts to get around the complication of that by leveraging the simple rule that surfices for use of traditional pronouns where the pronoun to use might be unclear: "use stated pronouns". The poster can therefore clearly indicate which of the confusing proposed pronouns they wish to use.

How can a request to use a pronoun be used to troll?

A troll might express the alienating position that "the only real genders are male and female" by ridiculing the very idea that neopronouns are necessary (or that they can be used as a singular pronoun) and/or ridiculing or insulting people with those uncommon genders.

Note that it does not really matter if "the only real genders are male and female" is a true statement (a fact). What can make a post a troll is that it is attempting to ridicule or insult.

In my discussion I've highlighted some points that I think are important for distinguishing genuine pronouns. A genuine request will have all the following characteristics. A troll will lack at least one of the following characteristics, and probably several.

• short: probably only one syllable.
• convenient: easy to type and say; in English discourse, having only English letters, with conventional English capitalisation, and having only English phonemes. Not the same as familiar: the first time you encounter a neopronoun you might well have to pause to decide how to pronounce if, just as you would with any other new word, but that is not the same as difficult to say.
• gender: used to express a gender (or group of genders, or to be gender neutral), not some other kind of characteristic or as mere personal expression or creativity; if challenged, the user should be able to point to a definition of the gender that the pronoun applies to.
• distinct: not the same as an existing word with a precisely different meaning (singular they passes this test because it is an established meaning). This is the weakest criterion, because finding new distinct short words that are convenient is hard. So it might have to be relaxed if a gender community adopted it.
• third-person: (in English) only the third-person pronouns are gendered, so genuine requests will be only for a third-person pronoun
• community: if challenged, the user should be able to point to a gender community that has already proposed use of the neopronoun and has already achieved some degree of support amongst themselves for using it; SE sites are not suitable for making those kinds of proposals and rallying support for them
• not rude or insulting: not a slur or rude word, and not suggesting such a word

Consider the classic troll "pronoun" request: attack helicopter. Note how it fails most of those tests.

Answer 16

It should only take a few comments for a troll to reveal themselves as such. If you don't give any indication of your suspicion, they'll get lazy and the reveal will happen sooner. It's probably best to wait until no doubt remains before calling them out. It's my experience, they usually go straight for the helicopter thing anyway. People who make fun of people for using different pronouns tend to be pretty simple-minded.