White House Ignores Reporters with Pronouns in Email Signatures
The Trump White House has deemed journalists who list pronouns in their email signature as incapable of "writing an honest story."
The Trump administration is refusing to answer questions from journalists who have their preferred pronouns listed in email signatures.
The policy abides by an executive order from President Donald Trump decreeing that the U.S. government will only recognize two sexes — male and female — as valid.
While the Trump administration has barred federal workers from listing preferred pronouns in email signatures as part of that order, it has also refused to respond to inquiries from journalists who engage in the practice on multiple occasions, reported The New York Times.
“As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote to a Times reporter who had inquired about the possible closing of a federal climate research observatory.
A few weeks earlier, Kate Miller, a senior adviser at the Department of Government Efficiency, declined to answer questions from another Times reporter asking about the legal status of the agency’s records.
“As a matter of policy, I don’t respond to people who use pronouns in their signatures as it shows they ignore scientific realities and therefore ignore facts,” Miller wrote in an email.
“This applies to all reporters who have pronouns in their signature,” she added in a separate message.
Contacted for comment about this trend, Leavitt told the Times in an email, “Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story.”
While pronouns in signatures have been used for decades in cases of cisgender individuals with gender-neutral or ambiguous names — such as Alex, Madison, Blake, Riley, or Quinn, to name a few — in recent years, the practice has become much more politicized as the transgender community has become more visible.
Those on the political Left began including pronouns as a way of clarifying their gender identity and signaling inclusivity and respect for transgender or nonbinary individuals. Trans and nonbinary individuals adopted the practice to avoid being misgendered.
Conservatives have taken umbrage at any reference to personal pronouns — even in cases where a person’s gender identity aligns with their assigned sex at birth — on the assumption that such references implicitly communicate support for the idea that a person’s sex may differ from their gender identity or outward expressions of gender, from hairstyle to clothing choice.
The practice does not just apply to reporters from the Times.
In carrying out a social experiment, Matt Berg, a reporter at Crooked Media, added “he/him” to a message he sent to Miller about the administration’s policy toward Ukraine.
Despite not normally using pronouns in his signature and not listing them on other social media platforms, Berg received a nearly identical response provided to the Times reporter.
“I find it baffling that they care more about pronouns than giving journalists accurate information, but here we are,” Berg told the Times in an email recounting his experience.
A spokesman for the newspaper responded to the controversy:
“Evading tough questions certainly runs counter to transparent engagement with free and independent press reporting. But refusing to answer a straightforward request to explain the administration’s policies because of the formatting of an email signature is both a concerning and baffling choice, especially from the highest press office in the U.S. government.”
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