Federal employees remove pronouns from email signatures

If you exchange emails with federal employees, don’t expect to see their preferred pronouns listed in their email signature.

Federal agencies barred their employees from including preferred pronouns in their email signatures in department directives sent out last week, USA Today reported.

“Pronouns and any other information not permitted in the policy must be removed from CDC/ATSDR employee signatures by 5. p.m. ET on Friday,” a memo sent to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees last Friday morning said, according to ABC News.

Acting Under Secretary of State for Management Tibor P. Nagy emailed all State Department employees with similar instructions. 

“The Department of State is reviewing all agency programs, contracts, and grants that promote or incubate gender ideology,” Nagy wrote, according to The Guardian. “All employees are required to remove any gender-identifying pronouns from email signature blocks by 5 pm today.” 

Additionally, agencies have been instructed to stop using email features that allow employees to list their preferred pronouns. 

“Review agency email systems such as Outlook and turn off features that prompt users for their pronouns,” says a memo created last week by the Office of Personnel Management. 

One anonymous federal employee expressed outrage over the Trump administration’s decision, telling ABC News, “In my decade-plus years at CDC I’ve never been told what I can and can’t put in my email signature.” 

Proponents say listing one’s preferred pronouns helps others affirm their so-called gender identity, especially for transgender-identifying individuals, according to the National Education Association. 

But Trump is making bold moves to combat gender ideology. 

He signed an executive order two weeks ago calling for the elimination of gender ideology from the federal government; it also recognized the existence of two genders – male and female – determined at birth. 

“‘Gender ideology’ replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true,” read the president’s order. “Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex. Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.” 

Further steps taken include a halt to the issuing of “Gender X” passports for those who identify as something other than male or female.