The Trump White House is intensifying its opposition to what officials describe as “gender ideology,” this time taking aim at the media. Senior members of the administration’s press team have begun declining to respond to journalists who include gender pronouns in their email signatures—a controversial move that has caught many mainstream reporters off guard.
In at least three documented cases, top White House aides reportedly dismissed media inquiries solely because the reporters identified themselves with pronouns such as “he/him” or “they/them.” “As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told a New York Times reporter who had asked about the future of a climate observatory.
The move mirrors a previous directive from President Donald Trump’s earlier term, which prohibited federal employees from including preferred pronouns in their official email signatures. At the time, the White House characterized the practice as part of a larger ideological agenda. Now, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and other senior officials are extending that stance to members of the press, arguing that journalists who include pronouns are engaging in political signaling rather than focusing on objective reporting.
“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 said in a separate email. Katie Miller, a senior adviser at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had a similar response when another Times reporter contacted her about government record-keeping. “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,” she said. “This applies to all reporters who have pronouns in their signature.”
Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, dismissed the media backlash in a terse email. “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.”