Journalists who have pronouns in their email signatures won’t get a response from the White House, according to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios,” the press secretary wrote to a New York Times reporter, the newspaper reported Tuesday.
“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,” Leavitt told The Daily Beast in a statement, repeating the response she gave about the matter to the Times.
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Pronouns—such as she/her, he/him, or they/them—are often used by individuals to indicate how they identify and wish to be addressed.
President Donald Trump has mocked preferred gender pronouns, telling Fox News in July 2024, “I don’t want pronouns,” and later quipping, “Nobody even knows what that means” when presenter Laura Ingraham jokingly asked if he was “fluid.”
The Times reported that Katie Miller, a senior adviser at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), also declined to answer questions from one of its reporters weeks earlier regarding the legal status of the department’s records.
“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,” Miller told the reporter in an email, adding: “This applies to all reporters who have pronouns in their signature.”
Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, tore into the newspaper with a savage dig.
“If The New York Times spent the same amount of time actually reporting the truth as they do being obsessed with pronouns, maybe they would be a half-decent publication,” he wrote.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House.
Meanwhile, federal workers at multiple agencies were ordered in January to remove their personal pronouns in email signatures, ABC News reported, citing internal memos that reference two executive orders signed by the president on Jan. 20, which are aimed at rolling back back diversity and equity programs in the government.
