NEW YORK (AP) — You know those email signatures at the end of messages? The ones that include a range of information about the senders — phone numbers, addresses, social media handles. And in recent years, pronouns — letting the recipient know that the sender goes by “she,” “he,” “they” or something else, a digital acknowledgement that people claim a range of gender identities.
Among those who don’t agree with that are President Donald Trump and members of his administration. They have taken aim at what he calls “gender ideology” with measures like an executive order requiring the United States to recognize only two biological sexes, male and female. Federal employees were told to take any references to their pronouns out of their email signatures.
That stance seems to have spread beyond those who work for the government to those covering it. According to some journalists’ accounts, officials in the administration have refused to engage with reporters who have pronouns listed in their signatures.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that two of its journalists and one at another outlet had received responses from administration officials to email queries that declined to engage with them over the presence of the pronouns. In one case, a reporter asking about the closure of a research observatory received an email reply from Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, saying, “As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios.”
It was unclear if this has become a formal policy of the administration. Leavitt did not respond to a request for comment.
In a statement to other news outlets, Leavitt said that “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.”
Email signatures as a point of contention
In its statement, 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.”
That even the words in email signatures could become yet another point of ideological contention is actually not surprising. Language — the words we use, the words we don’t, what we think we can and can’t say to others and they to us — represents a kind of “social signaling,” says Lauren Hall-Lew, professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
“The extent to which conversations around language and language policing are stronger and more politically bifurcated now would only be a reflection of the actual politics on the ground,” Hall-Lew says. “That’s what all of language is — it’s to communicate. But because we’re communicating between people, because people are messy, then all language becomes political.”
Pronoun identifiers in email signatures are no exception, she says. There was “a time when if you had pronouns in your sig files, assume that you were transgender. And we have come a long way in the sense that that is no longer the assumption for a lot of people. It’s more to do with your political positionality relative to transgender issues. And that was kind of the goal, actually, in trying to get cisgender people to put their pronouns in.”
The Associated Press has been involved in its own dispute with White House officials that includes issues of language. It sued Leavitt and two other White House officials on First Amendment grounds over being excluded from White House events after the news agency had decided not to follow Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico.
U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden, who was nominated by Trump in 2017, on Tuesday ruled in the AP’s favor, saying that government couldn’t retaliate over its editorial decision, a ruling that the White House said it would be appealing.