White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has been doing a fine job when it comes to putting reporters in their place. This applies not only to the briefing room, but also requests for comment that come in. On Tuesday night, in an article that has had Leavitt and White House policy trending over X, The New York Times reported that Leavitt has a message for journalists submitting requests with pronouns in their signature. As it turns out, she's not the only one.
"Pronouns in Bio? You May Not Get a Response From the White House," the headline warned. This shouldn't exactly be surprising coming from a Trump White House that has been dedicated to ending wokeness and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and has been particularly vocal about it.
The opening of the article even speaks directly to the Trump's view on pronouns, making it even less of a surprise.
As is mentioned:
The Trump administration formally barred federal workers from listing their preferred pronouns in email signatures, calling it a symptom of a misguided “gender ideology.”
Some White House officials are taking a similar approach with the journalists who cover them.
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.
“As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, wrote to a New York Times reporter who had inquired about the potential closing of a famed climate research observatory.
A few weeks earlier, Katie Miller, a senior adviser at the Department of Government Efficiency, declined to answer questions from another Times reporter who asked about 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,” Ms. Miller wrote in an email. She added in a separate message, “This applies to all reporters who have pronouns in their signature.”
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You'd think that that would be clear enough, but the piece continues from there, depicting how relentless the outlet is.
That White House Communications Director Steven Cheung is involved as well is not surprising, but no less amusing, especially since his comment was actually included:
Contacted for comment, administration officials did not directly say if their responses to the journalists represented a new formal policy of the White House press office, or when the practice had started.
“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,” Ms. Leavitt, the press secretary, wrote in an email.
Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, wrote in an 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.”
There's also some commentary from other reporters, as well as from the article itself, going after conservatives on this, predictably so. In reality, however, it's worth reminding that President Donald Trump for the 2024 campaign and even before then was himself quite vocal on how he felt about wokeness, and the American people still voted for him:
Conservative politicians and pundits zeroed in on the practice as an example of what they deemed runaway woke-ism and decried it as an attempt to normalize the concept that there are more than two biological genders, male and female, the “scientific realities” to which Ms. Miller appeared to refer.
...
The practice appears to have spread beyond reporters at The Times. Matt Berg, a reporter at Crooked Media, which runs the “Pod Save America” family of podcasts, ran an experiment in the middle of February after speaking with another journalist who had received a similar response.
Mr. Berg, who does not usually include pronouns in his email signature, added “(he/him)” to a message that he sent Ms. Miller, in which he asked a question about the administration’s policy toward Ukraine. He received a near verbatim response.
“I find it baffling that they care more about pronouns than giving journalists accurate information, but here we are,” Mr. Berg said in an email to The Times.
The Trump administration has made transgender issues a focus of its early policy agenda. President Trump signed an executive order declaring that there are two sexes, female and male, on his first day in office. The administration has since issued a series of policies that bar transgender people from serving in the military, prohibit transgender girls and transgender women from competing in women’s sports and roll back protections under certain anti-discrimination laws. Several of those policies are facing legal challenges.
A spokesman for The Times said: “Evading tough questions certainly runs counter to transparent engagement with free and independent press reporting. But 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.”
Yes, the article really did include "scientific realities" in quotes, despite there only being, in fact, two sexes, male and female. Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office making clear that the federal government recognizes this, as the piece also later acknowledged. In that same paragraph, though, the article does a disservice to women and girls, by framing another executive order, from February, that bans men and boys from competing in women and girls' sports as being about "prohibit[ing] transgender girls and transgender women..."
Matt Berg, of Crooked Media, is also mentioned, but not that the "Pod Save America" podcast hosts were aides to former President Barack Obama and particularly liberal that. Such complaining from him seems he just wants to complain about the Trump White House and gain attention for it.
The last paragraph there is important to include because it shows The New York Times behaving exactly as you'd expect, making this all about free press and playing the victim.
Not that we ever expected her to play around with the mainstream media, but Leavitt and other White House staffers are making it clear that they really aren't doing so. They have far better things to do with her time than answer to those so obsessed with their pronouns.
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