The New York Times says that reporters who contact Trump Administration officials to request statements or quotes on significant events or policies do not get a response to their emails if their signature includes their “preferred pronouns.” This has not been officially confirmed as administration policy, but Trump press spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the paper that policy it is, saying, “As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios. 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.” Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and spokeswoman for the Department of Government Efficiency, answered an inquiry on the topic, “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.” Trump’s presidential campaign account on X also claimed, “It is official White House policy to IGNORE reporters’ emails with pronouns in the signature.”
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
Is that policy, if that is the policy, fair and ethical?
I get it. I do. Any reporter who is committed to the pronoun game is almost certain to be woke, ergo biased, ergo Trump Deranged and untrustworthy. However, virtually all reporters fall into those categories whether they want to be called “they,” “he,” “she,” or nothing at all. The Trump folks have every reason to regard the fourth estate as hostile, because it is. However, this looks and feels like viewpoint discrimination. At very least, the policy is petty. Is it fair? Close call: nothing compels reporters to virtue-signal this way.
I regard this as a needless controversy that will only appeal to the most adamant of anti-LGPTQ critics.
I wouldn’t do it.
Ethics Alarms 
Much like your conspiracy theory friend making you question his judgment- people who support and people are fully confused by the gender madness by definition are some level of untrustworthy. So Leavitt isn’t wrong.
But yeah, it might be too tiny of a thing.
The they could always respond to anyone with preffered pronouns in their bio with:
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
As a Beatles fan, I like to say my preferred pronouns are “I, Me, Mine”. George Harrison could always be counted on to puncture the ego of anyone taking himself too seriously especially Lennon/McCartney), even if he sometimes did the same.
I like to think he’d be pointing out the ridiculousness of todays self-absorbed narcissists if he were still with us.
First George salute we’ve had here, and I’m grateful for it.
I regard this as a needless controversy that will only appeal to the most adamant of anti-LGPTQ critics.
Yes, it will appeal to the most adamant of the anti-LGPTwhatever critics. That’s not the point. It will, and has, also create high dudgeon amongst weirdos on Tik-Tok whose hair color is never found in nature.
THOSE vids then get discovered and trafficked on X and other social networks, thus reinforcing the view that these people are nuckingfutz. In other words, another classic Trumpian rope-a-dope.
My own cognitive dissonance scale is biased towards that view. This gag isn’t ethical, but dollars to donuts it will be effective.
For those that haven’t watched it yet, I strongly recommend that you search for and watch Bill Maher’s roughly 12-minute long report on his dinner with Trump at the White House.
Second on recommending the Maher vid (Mr. Maher Goes To Washington), AiM.
Anyone desiring an idea of how comically pervasive TDS is, just read some of the YouTube comments. I swear, Lefty would ask for a bacteria count on the milk of Human Kindness!
PWS
That they/them pronouns do incredible violence to legibility is reason enough.
https://english.elpais.com/culture/2024-12-15/judith-butler-philosopher-if-you-sacrifice-a-minority-like-trans-people-you-are-operating-within-a-fascist-logic.html?outputType=amp
Wouldn’t Karoline Leavitt’s statement alone be enough to confirm the move as official policy?
I tend to ignore pronouns in bios because most of the time they match the biological reality, and I expect the vast majority are there just because they think they’re supposed to be. I’ve yet to meet an actual “ma’am,” who asked to be addressed as “sir”, or vice-versa, and if I did, I think I would accomodate them, just for the sake of picking the right battles.
That being said, I can understand the current administration’s position in proactively weeding out reporters most likely to be hostile, and not giving them anything to feed on besides the lack of response. I can also understand repstrat’s point about refusing to humor the trans-pushing agenda, and letting the craziest howl about it, further discrediting the opposition. So all together, I’d say this is just barely on the ethical side of the line.
I find the best approach is usually to look at more than just the question presented. In this case, I can think of an entirely non-woke reason that a person named Alex, Chris, Dana, Kelsey, Leslie, Morgan, Sam, or Terry might want to include pronouns with their email.
Moreover, ignoring emails with pronoun signatures is just a petty thing to do. I’ve tried pettiness in my interactions with people before, to try and inspire humility. I find it inspires resentment instead. In my experience, my words carry so much more weight when I am magnanimous instead of petty–actively helpful to the people I’m arguing with, instead of a nuisance.
If ignoring emails with pronouns is a policy, it would be yet another unforced error by the Trump administration, a opportunity to build trust with new people wasted just to pander to Trump’s existing base. Trump may have an uphill battle winning over his opponents, but any good president should make the effort.
Besides, when people have a strong impression of you, that just means that a decisive statement on the right topic in the right way can make them wonder if they were wrong, without alienating your current supporters. If people are really wrong about Trump, I would advise him to hurry up and do something to prove it.
She/her/hers or He/him/his are the only ones that I will use. They/them is grammatically incorrect unless it is a conjoined twin. Xir or whatever means nothing to me. Language is used to communicate ideas not confuse people. If you appear to me as a female I will refer to you with others accordingly, The opposite is true if you present yourself physically as a male. If we are in correspondence and I cannot make a distinction then the salutation will simply be an M. followed by your name. I have no reason to describe you in any other manner.
I am with Mrs Q on this. The whole issue appears to have been created by those seeking a controversy in which one group seeks power over another through perceived victimization.
Exactly. It’s a form of controlled/forced speech, one in which a person tries, through language, to require another person to accept an alternate – and completely incorrect – version of reality.
A man who says he’s a woman is not a woman. A woman who says she’s a man is not a man. A man or woman claiming to be neither male nor female is not non-binary. An individual claiming to be more than one person is still an individual.
That is reality, whether those people like it or not, and I should not be required to accept, pander to, or celebrate someone else’s irrationality, which amounts to little more than mental delusion.
“Trump may have an uphill battle winning over his opponents, but any good president should make the effort.”
Trust is a two way street and the idea that a good president should pander to the opposition in order to try to win them over is foolish when the opposition sees it as weakness. You cannot be all things to all people. The left seeks to destroy. It does not seek to build anything but coalitions for the purpose of amassing power to take from others. Progressives use people. They care very little about the person. The person is only valuable as long as the individual serves their purposes. Trump used to serve their purposes when he financed them. When that stopped he was vilified.
I am not sure if this is pettiness or simply not willing to play in their games.
Anti-LGBTQ? Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals don’t have any use for pronouns. Only the T’s and maybe some Q’s do and even then, I rarely see these folks use pronouns after their name. It’s almost always progressive straight white women who seem hellbent on the pronoun thing as a form of by-proxy control of others. Quite frankly I’m fine with the Whitehouse not answering their questions and yes, I’m probably biased because I’m so tired of them inserting their noses in other minorities business.
“It’s almost always progressive straight white women who seem hellbent on the pronoun thing as a form of by-proxy control of others.”
While that’s been my observation, as well, is there any research or polls which confirms it?
PWS
Good point- it’s a TQ thing, and we should quit lumping all of the innocent LGB people in with their nonsense.
Among other things, pronouns signal that a person does not deserve to be treated seriously. I think it makes perfect sense for the White House to not engage with nonserious journalists.
it’s petty, but when you have guys like Elie Mystal saying they would like to be appointed by a democratic administration as director of petty so that they could make lives miserable for the other side I really have less of a problem with it. This is just turning the other side tactics on it, and somehow they think that’s not fair. I happen to believe turnabout is fair play. The whole point of this administration is that they are going to do to the other side as the other side did to them.
Elie has really jumped four or five sharks, and I now have him in Julie Principle territory. He’s out of his cotton-pickin’ mind, and I use that old line just to annoy him so he’ll call me a racist. It’s amazing to think back that I once paid attention to him.
Petty and dumb. But then this admin does not seem interested in civility or bridge-building, even when doing so might work towards turning foes to (at least) non-foes.
Ethical? They don’t care about ethics, so does that make this de facto unethical? Meh. I believe that this is just another distraction from what the admin is actually perpetrating. And, although this might be the most pressing issue for (some) LGBTQ+ people, and although I support whatever they want to be called, I believe that whoever (either side) is making this an issue is just muddying the waters.
Personally, I want to be called Maeve the Warrior Queen but no one seems interested in indulging me.
“They don’t care about ethics, so does that make this de facto unethical?”
Now you know better. Whether an act is ethical of not has nothing to do with intent or motives. The act itself matters: was it justified, fair and responsible under the circumstances? That’s the point of many—most?—of the points on EA. Is the conduct itself society and the culture should encourage or not? Totally pragmatic actions still should be ethical, whether the actor cares about it or not.
Good morning, Maeve.
Is the petty? I dunno. Here is my reaction when I see it from lawyers: “well, that person is not to be taken seriously.” I cannot fathom what a lawyer’s preferred pronouns have to do with that lawyer’s ability to practice law and advocate for clients. As Chris and Mrs. Q stated above, this is an issue (much like the reporter who corrected Anderson Cooper last week) raised by those seeking to control speech and thought by requiring conformity to groupthink. This current “policy” is destroying the ability to communicate clearly. I see it in news reports and it makes me crazy (well, crazier . . .) because I have no idea what the writer is trying to say. Referring to Brandon Jones in the third person plural is confusing. Frankly, Sister Mary Williams from St. Barnabas in the late 1960s and early 1970s and Prof. Gavlinsky from Walsh Jesuit High School in the 1970s would not have abided such sloppy writing
jvb
I expect the White House to push back against the trans agenda as long as the Democrats are trying to propose bills as the Kelly Loving Act in Colorado.
From KOAA website:
If passed, the Kelly Loving Act would add misgendering and deadnaming as acts of discrimination under Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act and prohibit the acts in public places.
The bill defines “misgender” as purposefully referring to someone using a different pronoun with the intent to disregard their gender identity. “Deadname,” according to the bill, means purposefully using someone’s birth name rather than their chosen name with the intent to disregard their gender identity.
The proposed legislation also says courts shall consider a parent deadnaming or misgendering their child as coercive control during child custody hearings. The bill said courts shall consider reports of coercive control when determining parenting time.
Personally I like to be polite and not cause any social friction related to trans issues, and I might be willing to use somebody’s preferred pronouns. However I hate to walk on eggshells, and be called and shamed on this issue like what happened to Anderson Cooper last week.
This is one of the reasons why people elected Trump. His “They/them” election ad was one of the most successful ads in the election campaign in 2024, and therefore you may expect the White House to push back as hard as they can against trans radicalism.
I’d say this policy is not petty, I’d call it fighting fire with fire. When you’re faced with a massive attempt to destroy and then rebuild a society, you need to fight the revolutionaries wherever they are.
How about leadership from the highest office in the land?
It’s saying we’re no longer playing the idiot make believe game of more than two sexes, with all of it’s attendant bs.
It’s not petty, it serves the larger goal of finding outlets whose goal is to get the truth out to the people as opposed to outlets whose goal is to foster insanity.
How is that unethical?
Now, they could all drop the pronouns, get called on, and still do crappy reporting (as happened in the decades prior), but that just highlights the insidious nature of what they’ve been doing.
Ethical move, in my opinion.
Not too long ago in a land not far away, an beep’s career was ended because boop decided to ally bop-self with the androids she—err, beep, was performing alongside in a very popular show.
There’s no such thing as preferred pronouns if an individual chooses some and then is severely punished for doing so. I think the pushback on the subversive coercion is overdue.
I wish the English language had a gender neutral pronoun as it would solve about half the problems with this issue. Troublemakers will always exist which means the other half of the problem will never get solved.
We do have a gender neutral pronoun. The word is “it” but because it is used for non human nouns people would be equally confused or worse the subject would be dehumanized.
Masculine feminine and neuter genders help identify the person place or thing in question. Some things like cars, boats and aircraft are often referenced in feminine terms such as “That’s my boat, she’s a real beauty.” One can only wonder why. It could be that these are things men control or things upon which men place high value.
It is petty, but I think the issue is a little more complicated.
For one, government employees have limited time. They probably get questions from all over the place all the time, so deciding on who to respond to and who to ignore can be a prudent use of time. If I have to decide between a source that embraces delusional beliefs and a source that is more down the line, I will always choose the down the line source.
On the other hand, I like government being responsive and open, even to sources that are hostile. I think that’s good for freedom and democracy. Obviously there’s a limit, but I tend to want to air on the side of transparency. Plus, I assume most reporters probably put pronouns in bios since most reporters are progressive. To not respond to any reporter with bios may end up skewing government to only communicating with more conservative outlets, which I’m not in favor of.
I think it would be more efficient to pick a variety of conservative and liberal outlets and respond to those who seem most the most professional. Everyone else would get the standard boiler plate responses every administration issues on various topics.