White House to ignore journalists who use pronouns in email bios

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says she will not engage with reporters listing pronouns as part of their email bios. Photo / Jabin Botsford, Washington Post

• White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said she will not engage with reporters listing pronouns.
• Reporters from the New York Times and Crooked Media were denied responses for using pronouns in emails.
• The Air Force’s ban on pronouns in email signatures violated the 2024 National Defence Authorisation Act.

The White House’s top spokesperson says she will not engage with reporters who list their pronouns in their email signatures, the Trump administration’s latest move to target expressions of gender identity in the workplace.

“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,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to the Washington Post.

The White House did not respond to follow-up questions about when a formal policy on the matter had been implemented or confirm whether this would apply to all correspondence between reporters and other White House officials outside the press office. But at least one Washington Post reporter has recently received replies from White House officials despite having an email signature listing pronouns.

Reporters at other news outlets appear to have experienced this snub over pronouns first-hand. The New York Times reported earlier that three of its reporters were denied responses from the White House because they listed pronouns in their emails. Matt Berg, a correspondent for the outlet Crooked Media, also said he listed his pronouns in his email to a Trump administration spokesperson as an experiment and was denied any information because of it.

Including one’s pronouns in introductions, over email and in-person, has become normalised across many industries in recent years as a way to show support with the transgender or non-binary community and prevent misgendering. But the practice has been fiercely rejected by Republican politicians, some of whom have introduced bills limiting pronoun changes at schools or mocked the use of pronouns in introductions.

On January 29, the White House ordered federal agencies to stop using any email features that prompt users for pronouns. President Donald Trump also issued an executive order on January 20, the day he was inaugurated, declaring that the official policy of the US would be to recognise two sexes, male and female. In Texas, Elon Musk, one of Trump’s closest allies, and Republican Governor Greg Abbott celebrated the firing of a Texas worker over his refusal to remove his pronouns from his email signature.

The US Air Force had also announced a ban on using “preferred pronouns” in email signatures, social media and official websites, before officials realised that such a measure violated a provision of the 2024 National Defence Authorisation Act, which prohibits any policy “regarding identification of gender or personal pronouns in official correspondence” – for or against.

The announcement comes shortly after a judge ordered the White House to lift restrictions it had placed on reporters for the Associated Press for continuing to use the Gulf of Mexico instead of what Trump renamed the Gulf of America. AP reporters were banned from Oval Office events, Air Force One and other official presidential events for nearly two months.