Donald Trump’s team refuses to report reporters for pronouns

It is well known that the government of Donald Trump has a major problem with diversity: The US President employees were already instructed in February to “remove pronouns to identify gender from email signatures”, as reported several US media, citing internal documents.

According to the documents, Trump declared it to be recognized as a government policy, “two genders, male and female”. Now the White House goes one step further – and apparently tries to enforce this policy at the press.

According to the “New York Times” (NYT), several cases are documented in which press spokesman would have refused to respond to official inquiries from journalists because these gender-specific pronouns such as “ER/ER/HE/HE/SEL” or “You/her” had specified in their email signature.

“From principle, we do not answer journalists whose personal information contains pronouns,” quotes the leaf Karoline Leavitt, the press spokeswoman of the White House after one of the newspaper reporters asked her in writing whether the government really planned to close a well -known climate research institute.

And a few weeks earlier, Katie Miller, senior consultant at Trump’s efficiency authority “Doge”, refused to answer a NYT reporter-on the same reason: “In principle, I do not answer anyone who uses pronouns in his email signature, since this is an indication that he ignores scientific realities and thus facts.”

Personnel pronouns in email signatures or on social media profiles have established themselves not only for private individuals, but also in companies in recent years. With their use, assignments are usually made to a gender, be it binary gender assignments such as “he” or “they” or indications of non -binary gender identities or transformation. The specification of pronouns indicates how a person wants to be addressed – and with which pronouns they identify.

Conservative US politicians have been trying to fight this practice for years. In their eyes, there are no more than two genders, and the specific indication of binary personal pronouns they consider superfluous, after all, you see a person on an externally seeing gender they belong.

At the request of the “New York Times”, the Trump government did not want to comment on whether this principle was a general rule of communication of the white house or since when it has been.

In an email, however, Trump’s press spokeswoman Leavitt emphasized: “Every reporter who decides to include his preferred pronouns in his biography obviously does not take care of biological realities-and therefore can therefore hardly report any truthful.”

So far, the “New York Times” speaks of several cases of this kind with its own employees as well as a case with a journalist and podist of the media group, which brings out the popular podcast “Pod Save America”.

Sources: “”; News agency dpa