Beyond Virtue Signaling: Perceived Motivations for Pronoun Sharing
Member of Trans Youth Project Team, Gordon Kraft‐Todd, Gregg Sparkman, Blair H. Hu, Liane Young · 2021
Sharing one’s pronouns when introducing oneself is an emerging practice intended to prevent assumptions of what pronouns to use when referring to others. This practice may make people comfortable sharing their pronouns so that they are not misgendered and may signal inclusiveness to transgender and nonbinary (TGNB) people. How do people in the United States perceive the motivations behind pronoun sharing? Three preregistered experiments (N=2,641), in addition to three pilot studies (N=8,219; results presented in SI), conducted in the US reveal that people perceive at least three underlying motivations for pronoun sharing when they learn that someone shared their pronouns in a workplace introduction: reputation signaling (trying to enhance one’s own reputation), identity signaling (straightforwardly indicating one’s identity and how one would like to be addressed), and norm support (sincerely endorsing pronoun sharing as a norm). We also show that the sharer’s TGNB identity influences the motivations that observers infer. In general, we find that perceptions of straightforward identity signaling and collective benefit-oriented norm support are higher, and perceptions of self-oriented reputation signaling are lower, when the sharer is transgender rather than cisgender. This research provides a novel characterization of social perceptions of trans-inclusive behavior.