White House Ignores Preferred Pronouns and the Journalists Who Use Them

The wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, celebrated on his social media site X late Friday, writing that the “pronoun bs is finally going away.”

“That was silly,” Musk, who heads up the Department of Government Efficiency and has been slashing crucial federal funding for months, wrote after reposting a pronoun knock-knock joke. “Thank god Trump won,” a user named TheDogeGlory replied below Musk’s post, to which he responded with a bullseye emoji.

Musk’s post comes days after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that administration officials would refrain from responding to inquiries from journalists who include their preferred pronouns in email signatures or bios. “As a matter of policy,” Leavitt wrote in an email from a reporter asking about the closure of a research observatory, “we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios.”

President Donald Trump’s administration, in January, instructed federal employees to remove any reference to their identifying pronouns from their email signatures and other forms as a part of the broad effort to roll back any and all evidence of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Or, as a Texas state employee found out, get fired.

Leavitt’s admission this week confirms that the press office is following suit.

“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,” the press secretary, who in just a few short months since Trump has taken office has gained a reputation as combative toward both individual journalists and legacy media in general, said in a separate statement to other news outlets.

Axios also confirmed on Wednesday that officials will continue to skirt these reporters, asking Trump spokesperson Harrison Fields if that was now their official policy. “FACTS!” he replied.

As The New York Times reported this week, “On at least three recent occasions, senior Trump press aides have refused to engage with reporters’ questions because the journalists listed identifying pronouns in their email signatures.”

A spokesperson for the Times said, “Evading tough questions certainly runs counter to transparent engagement with free and independent press reporting.”

“But,” they continued, “refusing to answer a straightforward request to explain the administration’s policies because of the formatting of an email signature is both a concerning and baffling choice, especially from the highest press office in the U.S. government.”

In one instance, Matt Berg, a reporter at Crooked Media, the network that runs the “Pod Save America” family of podcasts, decided to experiment with the new administration’s handling of journalists who include their pronouns.

Berg doesn’t usually include pronouns in his email signature. But, when he included “he/him” in an email to Katie Miller, a senior adviser at DOGE, he too was met with a response claiming that the use of pronouns is detrimental to science, that it was her policy to refuse to respond to journalists with listed pronouns, and that he was ignoring facts.

“I find it baffling that they care more about pronouns than giving journalists accurate information, but here we are,” Berg said in an email to the Times.

The press office has previously been harsh on reporters who do not use the language they prefer. In February, Leavitt and the administration blocked The Associated Press from covering multiple White House events because it refused to change its editorial style from “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America.” The AP sued Leavitt and two other White House officials on First Amendment grounds and won—though the White House said it would be appealing.

The White House’s handling of pronouns aligns with the president’s coordinated rollback of protections for transgender and nonbinary Americans and those who support them.

Trump has signed several executive orders targeting transgender people. In his first moments in office, the president signed an order declaring that the United States would only recognize two sexes, “male” and “female,” as defined at conception—a move that required government agencies to use an outdated and scientifically inaccurate gender binary on documents like passports, visas, and employee records. He also signed others aimed at barring transgender student athletes from playing on girls’ sports teams, restricting funding for gender-affirming care for people under 19, and removing transgender service members from the military. Multiple of Trump’s orders against transgender people are being challenged in the courts.

For Musk, this isn’t the first time he’s discussed preferred pronouns on X, formerly Twitter. In 2022, he wrote, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”

And in June of 2023, on the first day of Pride Month, Musk said he would allow users to intentionally misgender someone without consequence. He also claimed that he personally would use the pronouns that someone prefers for manners’ sake—something he has repeatedly chosen not to do with his own daughter.