Do you know those email signatures at the end of the messages? Those that include a variety of information about the senders: telephone numbers, addresses, social media handles. And in recent years, pronouns, let the recipient know that the sender happens “she”, “he”, “they” or something else, a digital recognition that people claim a variety of gender identities.
Among those who disagree with that are President Donald Trump and the members of his administration. They have pointed out what he calls “gender ideology” with measures such as an executive order that requires that the United States recognizes only two biological sexes, men and women. Federal employees were told to take any reference to their pronouns from their email signatures.
That position seems to have spread beyond those who work for the government for those who cover it. According to the accounts of some journalists, administration officials have refused to interact with journalists who have pronounts listed in their signatures.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that two of its journalists and one in another medium had received responses from administration officials to email consultations that refused to commit to them about the presence of pronouns. In one case, a reporter who asked about the closure of a research observatory received an email response from Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, saying: “As a policy issue, we do not respond to journalists with pronouns in their BIOS.”
It was not clear if this has become a formal administration policy. Leavitt did not respond to a request for comments.
In a statement to other media, Leavitt said that “any reporter who chooses to put his preferred pronouns in his biography clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and, therefore, you cannot trust to write an honest story.”
Email firms as a dispute point
In his statement, the Times said: “Evading difficult questions certainly goes against transparent participation with free and independent press reports. But refusing to answer a direct request to explain the administration policies due to the format of an email firm is both a worrying and disconcerting option, especially the highest press office of the United States government.”
That even words in email firms could become another ideological containment point in reality is not surprising. Language, the words we use, the words we do not do, what we believe we can and cannot tell others and they for us, represent a kind of “social signage,” says Lauren Hall-Lew, a professor of sociolinguistic at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
“The extent to which the conversations about language and language surveillance are stronger and more politically bifurcated now would only be a reflection of real policy in the field,” says Hall-Lew. “That’s all language, it is to communicate. But because we are communicating among people, because people are messy, so all language becomes political.”
The pronoun identifiers in email firms are no exception, she says. There was “a time when I had pronouns in their SIG files, suppose it was transgender. And we have traveled a long way in the sense that this is no longer the assumption of many people. It is more than to do with their political position in relation to transgender problems. And that was a kind of objective, when trying to make the cisgenero put their pronouns.”
Associated Press has been involved in its own dispute with White House officials that includes language issues. He sued Leavitt and two other White House officials for the reasons for the first amendment for being excluded from the White House events after the news agency had decided not to follow Trump’s executive order renamed the Gulf of Mexico.
The American district judge Trevor N. McFadden, who was nominated by Trump in 2017, ruled on Tuesday in favor of the AP, saying that the Government could not retaliate for its editorial decision, a ruling that the White House said it would be attractive.
