The Trump administration formally barred federal workers from listing their preferred pronouns in email signatures, calling it a symptom of a misguided “gender ideology.”
Some White House officials are taking a similar approach with the journalists who cover them.
On at least three recent occasions, senior Trump press aides have refused to engage with reporters’ questions because the journalists listed identifying pronouns in their email signatures.
“As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, wrote to a New York Times reporter who had inquired about the potential closing of a famed climate research observatory.
A few weeks earlier, Katie Miller, a senior adviser at the Department of Government Efficiency, declined to answer questions from another Times reporter who asked about the legal status of the department’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,” Ms. Miller wrote in an email. She added in a separate message, “This applies to all reporters who have pronouns in their signature.”
The practice of including pronouns, such as “he/him” or “they/them,” in email signatures and social media bios has become widespread in recent years as a way of clarifying one’s gender identity and conveying inclusivity and solidarity for transgender and nonbinary individuals.
Conservative politicians and pundits zeroed in on the practice as an example of what they deemed runaway woke-ism and decried it as an attempt to normalize the concept that there are more than two biological genders, male and female, the “scientific realities” to which Ms. Miller appeared to refer.
Contacted for comment, administration officials did not directly say if their responses to the journalists represented a new formal policy of the White House press office, or when the practice had started.
“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,” Ms. Leavitt, the press secretary, wrote in an email.
Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, wrote in an email: “If The New York Times spent the same amount of time actually reporting the truth as they do being obsessed with pronouns, maybe they would be a half-decent publication.”
The practice appears to have spread beyond reporters at The Times. Matt Berg, a reporter at Crooked Media, which runs the “Pod Save America” family of podcasts, ran an experiment in the middle of February after speaking with another journalist who had received a similar response.
Mr. Berg, who does not usually include pronouns in his email signature, added “(he/him)” to a message that he sent Ms. Miller, in which he asked a question about the administration’s policy toward Ukraine. He received a near verbatim response.
“I find it baffling that they care more about pronouns than giving journalists accurate information, but here we are,” Mr. Berg said in an email to The Times.
The Trump administration has made transgender issues a focus of its early policy agenda. President Trump signed an executive order declaring that there are two sexes, female and male, on his first day in office. The administration has since issued a series of policies that bar transgender people from serving in the military, prohibit transgender girls and transgender women from competing in women’s sports and roll back protections under certain anti-discrimination laws. Several of those policies are facing legal challenges.
A spokesman for The Times said: “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.”
Shawn McCreesh contributed reporting.
