Five days ago, drag was banned from !politicalmemes@lemmy.world for using neopronouns. A comment explaining drag’s pronouns, and a comment saying “drag” isn’t a nickname, were removed with the reason “trolling”. Drag understands why someone would think that using different pronouns than most people is trolling - transphobia. However, drag is confused how on earth not liking a nickname is a violation of any rules anywhere.
Context of the removed comments:
Drag would like to pre-empt any further accusations of trolling by asking a question: If drag were a right wing troll, and you chose to freely accept drag’s pronouns, wouldn’t that completely neuter the trolling attempt? Trolling is about trying to make others upset. You don’t have to get upset when someone uses unusual pronouns. If you aren’t transphobic, then it’s impossible to troll you that way. And drag promises: drag wants you to not be transphobic. Drag is not trying to upset anyone. If you do what drag wants you to do, then you get what you want too. This is a non-issue, there’s only a problem if you want there to be.
EDIT: DRAG DID NOT TELL ANYBODY TO USE DRAG’S PREFERRED PRONOUNS.
Pronouns are generic by nature. A custom pronoun that applies to one person and only one person isn’t a pronoun, it’s a noun.
I agree with this, it’s why I find the concept of nounself and noun pronouns a bit confusing and unintuitive. Neopronouns, as in, the new gender neutral pronouns Ze/Zir, Xe/Xem/Xyr, Ve/Vis, etc. while they might be new to people aren’t unintuitive, they function the same as any other pronoun, and can be used as drop in replacements for he/him and she/her.
Personalized pronouns like drag, apple, doll, demon, etc. don’t work as well, because they aren’t a generic replacement for using a person’s name, they are more akin to a nickname and thus do not flow well in language as a replacement for pronouns.
Yeah, someone with the name “dragonfucker” using “drag” as a first person pronoun definitely doesn’t have the benefit of the doubt in my book.
And if you list your pronouns, you are in fact asking others to use them. I don’t give a solitary shit what you call me, hence there not being any pronouns next to my name.
Part of what might make people think you’re trolling is that you seem to use “drag” as a first person neopronoun but conjugate your verbs as if it were third person.
To someone who hasn’t seen this before, interpreting it as if you use a nickname to talk about yourself in third person would be the only thing that makes grammatical sense.
Edit: this reminds me a bit of https://www.xkcd.com/169/ - you don’t come across as smug, but you’re definitely not communicating well
No, people are very used to conjugating pronouns in a way that doesn’t match their grammatical preconceptions. Take the pronoun “they”. A lot of people complain about they/them because they say it can’t be used in the singular. What they mean is, they find it difficult to conjugate properly.
“I need to talk to Sam before they go to the store”
“I need to talk to Sam before they goes to the store”
The second sentence here is conjugated the same way as he or she, but it sounds wrong to us. In order to use they/them pronouns on the regular, we all had to learn that conjugation doesn’t depend on the grammatical form of the reference, but instead on the specific pronoun. “They” is conjugated differently not because it’s a plural, but because it’s “they”.
People who have a problem with the conjugation of drag’s pronouns simply failed to think carefully about this fact. They’re having the singular they debate all over again, because they didn’t change their understanding of pronouns after they had this debate the first time. Well drag doesn’t want to have that debate all over again. Drag doesn’t think drag’s existence should lead to any sort of debate. Drag thinks people should just accept new ideas without having to be argued into accepting them. But for some reason, a lot of people see drag, and they want to be argued with.
First/second person neopronouns are not like singular they because they haven’t been used for centuries already. Always using plural forms with “they” is something that English speakers learn before formally learning what a plural is (that’s why “I need to talk to Sam before they goes to the store” sounds wrong even to someone in primary school), but idiosyncratic redefinitions of grammar will always sound wrong to people who aren’t used to them.
If your goal is to communicate effectively, you should avoid insisting on what can be easily (mis)interpreted as performative. If it isn’t, then complaining about being misunderstood is trolling.
Drag has neither insisted anyone use drag’s pronouns, nor complained about being misunderstood. It seems like the scenario you’re describing as a problem hasn’t happened. Is this intended to be a warning for the future?
YDI. Replacing ungendered pronouns and insisting on their usage by others to refer to you is, at best, being annoying for its own sake. Like that fellow who insisted that their gender was ‘droneself’, or Phlubbadubba suddenly taking up Old English.
I remember that person, I’m basically convinced they were a troll, they’re basically taking advantage of the fact that decent and well meaning people try their best to follow pronoun preferences, and are asking them to do something extremely difficult and lashing out and abusing those people when they make a mistake.
Honestly I have great hostility towards people who do this shit, because they are utilizing pronoun preferences as a form of bad-faith trolling so they can accuse people of being transphobes. I’ve had a lot of moments where I made myself feel really bad about encounters like this and felt like an awful person only to figure out later either from going back on the history of the interaction, or from talking with my other trans friends that I wasn’t wrong or the asshole, they were.
I have a friend who does legitimately use noun pronouns (demon/demonself), however they also use they/them and ze/zir and they don’t flip out when people don’t use demon/demonself pronouns, they also don’t yell at people for getting their pronouns wrong on accident. They usually just correct people, if it was on purpose they have gotten mad, they told me about a time when some transphobic right-winger insisted they were a “boy with boobs” and they did yell at that person, but they wouldn’t yell at a random person IRL or online for saying miss/ma’am/sir because that isn’t a reasonable or respectful reaction to something that was or likely was a mistake.
They didn’t insist anyone use it, they only explained it. This doesn’t merit removing comments, let alone a ban.
DroneRights? They absolutely insisted, to the point of creating a community dedicated to chronologging the extent of their victim complex and persecution fetish
The only reason that stopped is because they kept getting banned when they would post to that community from their ban evading alts
I think it’s very concerning that at no point did the admins of that server ever intervene and axe that community and user for their vile and harassing behavior. Like accusing user Stamets of being a racist for, I don’t even actually know, because he disagreed with them? Because he banned them? I don’t even remember. It was stupid and uncalled for.
Phlubbadubba is based and drag always thought you were based in the past when reading your comments. Maybe you misunderstood? Drag never insisted that gamermahn should use drag’s preferred pronouns. Gamermahn specifically asked, as you can see in the screenshot, and drag only replied to answer that question. The only reason there was any conflict is because Gamermahn asked a question about drag’s pronouns and then proceeded to argue with the answer. Drag didn’t do anything to antagonise them, they came into that situation looking for a fight. And drag didn’t give them one, drag calmly answered their question and used please when asking not to be called by a nickname.
Trolling is about trying to make others upset.
This is wrong. Trolling is about attention. Making others upset is an easy way to get attention but it’s not the only one. Gimmick accounts are another, for example.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/troll
to antagonize (others) online by deliberately posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content
Drag isn’t hip to the newest versions of the slang
