The description seems clear. It's about using certain pronouns to disguise the identity of the character. So unless the faux pas is used to misdirect the audience as to who is being spoken to, then I don't think it qualifies.
If it helps, I think the trope is badly named. I first thought it referred to that Looney Tunes gag with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.
I would believe that the description was clear (and was clearly what you said) if it were just the first two paragraphs. The stuff about gender-neutral people in Speculative Fiction, though, is pure convention — it's not about identity concealment at all. So it seems a lot closer to my example.
132 is the rudest number.And that paragraph starts out with "A similar effect...". Not quite the same thing.
YKTTW "Using The Wrong Pronoun Gets A Character In Trouble." It's not the same as "The author had to work around gendered pronouns to hide the gender of a character."
Where are you finding that YKTTW? It doesn't seem to be linked from the page...
I think I've managed to unpack my confusion. The most natural reading of the description would be "the trope consists of this thing, and there's also a similar thing that happens sometimes (which is not the trope)". But would mean that a sizable chunk of the examples were wrong, as well as violating the Law of Conservation of Detail. So I'd rather take the more charitable reading of "there's this thing which is a form of the trope, and then this other similar thing which is also a form of the trope". Unfortunately, that means there's no actual definition — you're just expected to abstract out from the two forms of the trope to the thing they have in common. And I can think of several ways of doing that, some of which include my example and others of which don't.
132 is the rudest number.Inappropriate tutoyer and vousvoyer would be a cousin trope to First-Name Basis, which covers a lot of the same ground, but has that irritating assumption of Japan-only relevance.
Jet-a-Reeno!^^ I meant "Make a YKTTW for it." It's a trope. We don't already have it. There's a substantial difference between "A character's sex or gender is obscured by avoiding the use of gendered pronouns" and "A character causes a problem for himself by using the wrong form of a pronoun to another character". All they really have in common is that they both ar about pronouns.
edited 12th May '11 2:06:40 PM by Madrugada
I wouldn't say this is Pronoun Trouble, because the pronouns are only used here to indicate a certain level of politeness/familiarity between the speakers and while a faux-pas can be a pretty big problem in languages that have this differences, the reason for this are the breach in personal boundaries, not the pronoun itself.
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If Pronoun Trouble is supposed to be "A character's sex or gender is obscured by avoiding the use of gendered pronouns", what is the distinction between it and Gender Neutral Writing? It looks to me like it's supposed to be either a translation trope about the difficulty of translating between languages with different pronoun genderings (which is certainly what Gender Neutral Writing thinks it is) or a trope about people's pronoun systems failing in weird situations, sort of like Time-Travel Tense Trouble.

Suppose there's a scene in which a character, speaking French, commits a social faux pas by using tu (the familiar "you") in a situation where vous (the formal "you") would be more appropriate. Is that an example of Pronoun Trouble? It's certainly a kind of trouble with pronouns, but it doesn't really match the description; on the other hand, the description is pretty unclear...
132 is the rudest number.