Federal employees told to remove pronouns from email signatures by end of day

https://abcnews.go.com/US/federal-employees-told-remove-pronouns-email-signatures-end/story?id=118310483

by impish9208 • 1 year ago

63 108 1 year ago

abcnews.go.com

metadat• 1 year ago

Why expend all the effort to prevent people from expressing themselves? What a waste of time and resources.

I really want less divisiveness. The world has plenty enough already.

At present we're all stuck on this rock together.

darth_avocado• 1 year ago

Not my opinion but the rationale behind this, as argued, is that removing pronouns will cause less divisiveness because fewer people care about pronouns than politics.

marcod• 1 year ago

DEI is just their latest obsession, since the old ones don't poll as well anymore (gay marriage, woke, CRT, SJW, ..). I don't think there is a bigger rationale behind this than 'we need a wedge issue to rile up the masses'.

t-writescode2• 1 year ago

Every single employee should change their name to Alex and Sam.

keybored5• 1 year ago

They scream about fringe issues that few people care about and then claim that it is for the benefit of the majority.

Like all the brouhaha they manufactured about trans people, a vanishingly small part of any population.

Thrymr• 1 year ago

And does it reduce divisiveness by forcing this to happen in a few hours across the federal workforce of a couple million people?

If this was a serious rationale, the agencies would have some time to make a plan and implement it (say 30 days). This is exactly to sow division and chaos, to find out who the enemies of this administration are, and who will comply without complaining to ridiculous wasteful demands.

frob2• 1 year ago

Sadly, with this administration, the divisiveness, like the cruelty, is the point.

NoMoreNicksLeft4• 1 year ago

I don't think I understand "pronouns" if what you say is true. "Pronouns" are not about expressing yourself, but how other people express about yourself. As federal employees, it's probably unconstitutional for them to censor or suppress other people's expressions (certainly to do that without a court order).

But maybe I've just never understood what people mean about "pronouns".

butter9994• 1 year ago

That's like saying, "you can't tell me what your name is, or whether you'd like to be called Mr., Ms. or Mrs. That's not self expression, that's controlling my speech, and so that's censorship."

The same logic is employed in both cases. The difference is that telling someone your name has no political charge to it.

You can dislike the practice of listing your pronouns, but it's perfectly ordinary to tell people how you'd like them to refer to you.

DanielHB• 1 year ago

Probably an excuse to fire people who refuse.

Sharlin• 1 year ago

Because Americans voted to power the most narcissistic person imaginable – again

— who now has a personal vendetta against everything left-leaning because he was "robbed" an election

— for whom everything is now about using his power to punish and retaliate against his perceived enemies as well as securing for himself some sort of a "great man" legacy

— who, having learned from the last time when there were some adults in the White House, has now been careful to surround himself by spineless yes men

— who is nevertheless easy to manipulate by politically savvy people who know how to pander to his massive, yet incredibly fragile, ego.

alistairSH5• 1 year ago

Why expend all the effort to prevent people from expressing themselves?

Because being mean is a feature, not a bug, of this administration. This has everything to do with "othering" anybody who doesn't conform to the Republican notion of a normal person (ie, passes for white, heterosexual, and male; with exceptions for attractive women and Uncle Toms).

relyks• 1 year ago

This is actually dumb. I go by he/him pronouns and I put them in my signature, because my first name is gender-neutral. I find it annoying when people assume I'm female over email correspondence. Not considering people with different genders or who have a desire to use different pronouns, I'm sure there are other people like me in the federal government. What's next? They'll tell people they need to change their name to match their assigned birth gender?

anon2912• 1 year ago

Just use the typical way and put 'Mr.' in front of your name in your signature.

redwoolf4• 1 year ago

What is the salutation for they/them pronouns?

lesuorac• 1 year ago

At this point, I think the typical way actually is to have (he/him) at the end.

mpalmer• 1 year ago

Putting "Mr." or "Ms." in front of your name is including your pronouns, and to suggest otherwise is ridiculous.

tolien2• 1 year ago

A chunk of the federal employee base will have something like "LTC" or "Dr." in front of their name, which again confers no indication of gender or preferred pronoun.

low_tech_love• 1 year ago

How about “no”?

freddie_mercury• 1 year ago

This is what my colleagues in Vietnam have been doing for decades (well, the two decades I've been doing business there).

Vietnamese names are gendered but Westerners have no idea which genders go with which names. (Is Duy male or female? How about Duyen?) So, at least in my experience, they've always just put Mr/Ms in their email so people know which it is.

dyingkneepad• 1 year ago

"Relyks is an employee of ACME corp. He works in the Hell, MI office."

Something like that?

Insanity• 1 year ago

This is so stupid lol.. why should it be mandated, just have it optionally present.

redwoolf4• 1 year ago

Republicans are the party of personal liberty until they don't like what you're doing.

hypeatei• 1 year ago

This is basically what happened with abortion. The supreme court overturned Roe v. Wade and the Republican argument was that it was just a "State's rights" issue but then introduced a federal bill to protect the "preborn"[0] recently. It's fine until states do what they don't like.

0: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/722

Reasoning3• 1 year ago

And ditto the Democrats.

datavirtue• 1 year ago

RINOs

bitshiftfaced• 1 year ago

Here is a document about pronouns from the CDC's website (~2022): https://web.archive.org/web/20221221141850/https://npin.cdc....

Here's part of the document (emphasis added):

Make Your Support Visible!
• Include “pronoun:” under “name:” in name tags and introductions in groups as an opportunity for participants to make their pronouns visible. At the beginning of the semester, educators can call out students by their last name instead of their first name in case a student has not been able to change their name in the Student Information System or legally. Let students know that after class they can let you know what name they use if it is different than what is on the roster.
• At the beginning of the semester, educators can pass out 3x5 notecards to students and ask them to add their name, pronouns, and whatever information you feel is necessary to know about the student that they might not want to share out loud.
• Have pronouns be added to all email signatures, and link the word “pronouns” to this guide or another reference for people who are new to this practice: ‒ Sincerely, Mx. Marvel Pronouns: They, Them, Theirs

Granted, part of the document talks about not having to share your pronouns, but we don't know what kind of internal policies they had that employees either needed to follow or at least felt pressure to follow.

readthenotes12• 1 year ago

I'm not sure the e o. affects the pronoun pronouncements on personal email accounts. If it does, you may have. Otherwise it's irrelevant

all2• 1 year ago

It isn't really 'personal liberty' being removed in this case. This is a bureaucracy that is enforcing external appearance standard. I'm sure these folks will be free (!) to express themselves however they like in their personal lives.

panarky• 1 year ago

Curious how all the "free speech absolutists" have suddenly discovered infinite examples of when it's a great idea to censor speech.

INTPenis• 1 year ago

I'm not even part of that country but I honestly expected them to take a higher road. Considering they claim to value personal freedom so much.

I guess they didn't stay classy

alistairSH5• 1 year ago

"Rules for thee, none for me" - Republican motto since time immemorial

t-writescode2• 1 year ago

The way it was explained to me is more complicated.

It’s about hierarchy. The higher you are in the imagined hierarchy, the more things don’t apply to you.

The president is at the top, so he can do anything.

The WASP housewife is in the middle, so she can get an abortion because her case is special.

The minority commits all crimes and is killing babies.

So, it’s not contradictory in their mind, they literally think they’re better, and it’s why there’s value in having people lower than them in their mental system.

redwoolf4• 1 year ago

So I'm going to be that guy. It wasn't until Nixon and his southern strategy that the modern Republican Party became the Party we know today. The coalitions that formed the political parties before then were based more on tradition and geography than on ideology. The Republican Party has been moving ever more rightward (and pulling the Democratic Party along with it) since Reagan. America doesn't even have a Center-Left party anymore as result of this.

llamaimperative7• 1 year ago

they claim to value personal freedom so much

It's hilarious how many born-and-bred blue staters I know actually fall for this. As someone who grew up around the GOP base: I've met literally zero who had actual commitment to personal liberties.

kytazo• 1 year ago

Yes they forgot that while trying to make a statement or something

written-beyond• 1 year ago

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"

Both sides doing the same thing, disappointing.

stebalien• 1 year ago

I have to wonder, is this (and all the rest) just an attempt to DoS civil rights groups?

DiggyJohnson• 1 year ago

Those made nearly everyone uncomfortable in my experience and were the height of performative advocacy policy. But my experience comes from my time at a company that had a (soft) requirement to add those to our signature. I just don’t think a company needs to give much guidance at all on what goes in an email signature. I’m totally okay with anyone that includes pronouns on their own volition.

alistairSH5• 1 year ago

Yes, for most people it was performative, but seriously, if being asked to call somebody by the gender they prefer makes you uncomfortable that's a you problem, not a them problem.

readthenotes12• 1 year ago

Being asked to accommodate anyone else's preferences is certainly a "me" problem.

My preference is that people would understand that personal rights are social obligations and I think we would be better off to phrased it that way.

And for goodness sake, stop using loudspeakers when you're walking the wilderness trails. I don't want to hear what you consider music

kcplate5• 1 year ago

Those made nearly everyone uncomfortable in my experience and were the height of performative advocacy policy.

I won’t do it, but don’t care if others do in email signatures. I find it odd when it’s done in a meeting but I still won’t offer them up even if others are. I have been asked for mine a couple of times (and this irritates me…if you want me to respect that your pronouns are important to you, respect that “my” pronouns are unimportant to me). I respond with something akin to “your best guess will be fine with me”.

Volundr3• 1 year ago

respect that “my” pronouns are unimportant to me

I can respect this if and only if it's actually true. If your going to be offended if someone uses a pronoun for the wrong gender, or uses "they" then I don't respect the performance, and in my experience most people who are resistant to giving their pronouns would indeed be offended by either of those.

If you actually don't care, great, no problem. If you do I can't respect being unwilling to put in the miniscule effort to state your preference instead of being offended when someone doesn't default to it.

mauvehaus• 1 year ago

Seen online, goodness only knows where:

"I identify as a threat. My pronouns are try/me."

New email signature for a government employee who's uninterested in complying, perhaps?

LanceJones• 1 year ago

What's happening? I've been reading HN for 15 years, and I'm seeing more and more political BS disguised as something worth sharing HN... wtf?

llamaimperative7• 1 year ago

What's happening?

An overhaul of perhaps the single most important institution on the planet, the US federal government?

Reasoning3• 1 year ago

An overhaul? It's literally just telling people to take pronouns out of their email signature.

fzeroracer• 1 year ago

Tech companies decided to throw out any pretense of being neutral and go all in with the current administration. In turn, the current administration is trampling on peoples rights and causing downstream effects.

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

Even HN gets caught in political shitstorms, but you can quickly help filter them out by clicking the flag link and moving on to something else.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#:~:text=Off...

happytoexplain3• 1 year ago

This is not by itself a defense, but you're speaking relatively ("more and more"), so the obvious thing to point out is that things have gotten more and more extreme within the political right in the US over that time frame, and more quickly as time goes on. More extreme means more likely to break the "worth posting even though it has political content" barrier, wherever that bar is for each submitter.

sincerecook• 1 year ago

Back to reality.

ffhhj• 1 year ago

“This idea that science cannot continue until there’s a political lens over it is unprecedented,” said Anne Schuchat, a former principal deputy director at the CDC. “I hope it’s going to be very short-lived, but if it’s not short-lived, it’s censorship.”

What's going on with all the censorship, next we will now is people thrown to jail for their ideas.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/30/health/bird-flu-mmwr-paus...

grahamgooch• 1 year ago

These signatures have morphed into signaling one’s political leaning. It’s a good idea to keep such signals (whether intended or not) out of official communications.

For example, the Swastika was/is a religious symbol to billions of people. But became a political symbol and is a trigger point today

grepexdev• 1 year ago

I think that's fair. It is akin to a business establishing email etiquette for it's employees.

Now, if it were the government telling citizens to not use pronouns in their emails, that of course would be overreaching.

cr125rider• 1 year ago

As someone who works with a lot of international people with names I’m not familiar with, it can be really helpful to have pronouns. At a minimum. But also I like freedom. Call people what they want to be called.

mrala• 1 year ago

Are you seriously comparing the use of pronouns in emails to swastikas?

jmclnx• 1 year ago

All pronouns ?

So instead of saying "I thought she said" I need to say "I thought said" ?

Nice, I almost wish I worked for the Fed Gov.

mesk• 1 year ago

Lets do some dummy math:

2 milion federal employees, lets say half of them has email and each of them spends 1 minute on this.

It costs then 1 milion man-minutes, thats 694 man-days or almost 2 man-years. So this will cost at least 60k dolars, presuming 30k a year is a minimum salary. It isn't.

Money well spent ! Lets start THE cost cutting :)

Oh, I forgot this is gov, so it will costs at least 10 times more then what I'm counting. And I was very optimistic, employee forced to do unnecessary things will easily spend half a day on this.

nickthegreek2• 1 year ago

Oh but you forgot all the future cost savings of new employees not having to spend time entering them!

dgrin91• 1 year ago

Wait till you learn about coffee breaks.

ydlr• 1 year ago

Once the war on pronouns is won, this one votes on eliminating adverbs next.

Federal employees told to remove pronouns from email signatures by end of day

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