Now federal employees can't even use pronouns in their emails.
- The Center Square: Federal employees reportedly told to remove pronouns from email signatures.
https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/1/31/2300462/-Now-federal-employees-can-t-even-use-pronouns-in-their-emails?pm_campaign=blog&pm_medium=rss&pm_source=Open linkView original on ponder.cat294
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This is just begging for malicious compliance.
You want to eliminate an entire part of speech? Then good luck trying to understand what the fuck my email is trying to say.
In the article it specifies you to remove pronouns from your email signature. Definitely less fertile ground for malicious compliance, but it's still doable.
End every email body with "For your response, I am referred to using (feminine/masculine/any/whatever) pronouns"
Replace it with "[Insert Pronouns Here]". Make sure to have your desk already cleaned out though.
Does the reader want to eliminate an entire part of speech? Then good luck trying to understand what the fuck the writer’s email is trying to say.
Could be fun. I bet ChatGPT could automate it.
DeepSeek can automate it
Which one are they going to outlaw next? Verbs? Or Adjectives?
Exactly... Maybe have a boilerplate disclaimer at the top of each email that does include pronouns, just explaining that the following email has had all pronouns removed so as to comply with the new rule.
"The following email has had all pronouns removed in compliance with blah blah blah. Readability has unfortunately, but obviously, been significantly reduced. Apologies will be made available at a later date."
FUCKING PRONOUNCE turns red and screams
Think it is important for people to remove all pronouns from documents. Without, people will be more free to interpret what these messages mean to. This type of malicious compliance will only go so far, sadly.
Comment used it, these, and this. Please remove offensive pronouns, children may be present and children must not learn the english language
Reminds me of...
I've said it before, I remember reading this novel as a teen and finding the parts about language to be boring and far-fetched.
Looking back, it was probably one of the most important things that Orwell discussed. That shit is incredibly powerful, and it fundamentally shapes how we think and view the world without us even realizing it.
I remember reading Thomas Paine in high school and most of the students couldn't even understand it. That stuff was printed for the average bloke 200 years ago. The stuff that helped light the American populace to take up arms and overthrow tyrannical rule isn't even comprehendible to our poorly educated populace now. Being a genius isn't required to foment revolution, but common language is, literally and figuratively.
If you haven't learned vocabulary, your brain struggles to conceive, identify and of course use it in course of thought. One of the reasons right wing news and cable so often misuses and deliberately butchers important words like traitor, fascist, etc. is they want to strip them of their very important meaning so they aren't notable when used.
21% of adult Americans are considered to have low English literacy. Two thirds of these people were born in the US. This basically means they can read the words in a paragraph, but not understand the meaning of the paragraph. A further 4% are functionally illiterate.
This is disgusting.
Fuck "No Child Left Behind". Kids shouldn't pass elementary school without being able to deduce the meaning of a paragraph unless they have a mental disability. I don't care if they have to repeat 5th grade three times. And of course any non passing student should be offered tutoring for free long before they get to the point of being held back.
The demonization of pronouns is a subtle way to get that illiteracy rate higher.
Oregon, despite being home to Powell's books and thought of as progressive has one of the worst high school graduation rates,ath and literacy rates in the country. After the pandemic they straight up removed many math and English requirements from high school curriculum under the guise of "equity" for those affected by the learning disruptions cause by COVID. It was pretty clearly less about serving disadvantaged students than raising the abysmal education statistics.
That said, educators are doing as much social work now as they are education as society collapses in on itself and generational poverty, social ills related to poverty, poisons in our environment and relating depression and anxiety from young to old metastasize nationally. Teachers cannot hope to fix all that in a few hours a day let alone make up for years of lacking learning environments outside of school for their students.
They're teaching phonics still in 3rd grade.
Yeah, I know a little about what they're dealing with. My sister-in-law is a high school history teacher. She still has to bartend at least two nights a week to afford to raise her kids. On top of all that extra unpaid work.
The Oregon thing is new to me but not surprising. They'd already begun changing teaching to be about passing the standardized tests rather than learning by the time I graduated high school, over 20 years ago.
I had my son read this book. He was partway through and began exclaiming how much it paralleled today.
Hugely pedantic here, but only “it” is a pronoun there (specifically an anticipatory subject, a kind of expletive pronoun), the others are adjectives.
They should replace all pronouns with [redacted].
So is it alright to just assume trump is female? The email signature no longer states her preferred pronouns, so I think this is what she wants?
She did sign that executive order designating everyone as female, too.
The writer believes that such an idea is quite stupid. In fact, the writer believes that the audience will find this language extremely obtuse. These methods will only cause more pain to the federal employees in question.
Don't forget pronouns like who, mine, and ours. In fact, here's a list of >100
Someone should write a script that completely replaces these with BS standins
I think we need a tool that automatically rewrites text to remove all pronouns, but I'm not even sure that is possible.
I guess Trump doesn't want to be referred to as He/Him
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-appears-accidentally-declared-every-174749266.html
Hmmm, I see...
my new bio: (masculine neutral/masculine possessive)
Isn’t it nominative/objective?
I don’t see “he/his” or “they/their,” I see “he/him” and “they/them.”
I put all of them in, ie he/him/his... just to remove ambiguity.
And pronouns remain in my sig. Ain't going anywhere.
Probably! Been a long time since I’ve been to school.
but they banned mentioning gender, change it to (identifying with the societal archetype of the sex producing the small reproductive cell)
How does this hold up against a first amendment test?
When "What Trump wants goes" is all the Supreme Meme Court cares about
Well it's not a private entity hiring them, it's the actual govt. Usually the defense is that those are private companies and they can do what they want but that doesn't apply here
Because their employer is the US Government. The very entity the 1st Amendment protects us from.
Most of that isn't political speech. You absolutely still have the right to political speech as a government employee. Even the military was forced to let soldiers have political speech. The dividing line is where it looks like the speech is from the government instead of from you. Personal pronouns are hardly going to be from the government.
In your assertion the government could simply remove the rights of civil servants by issuing a policy. And that's just not how rights work.
It'll never have to
Wouldn’t the world be better off if no one knew each others gender? If you’re a cis man and find yourself attracted to another man? Congrats you’re gay now.
Hope you're not named Elle.
Trump's idol **inrich ***mler would be offended too!
nul42 would stop using pronouns completely and just use genderless nouns or proper names instead.
\sigh
shemails?
So, rather than make it.a choice, the Reich Wing is anti-choice. As typical.
Use of pronouns outlawed. Now they have to say “that person” or call them by their name.
Oh no what a shame
But why would a pronoun be in a signature? Something like Her Majesty, Patricia Jones, Dept. of Health?
So people know how you would like to be addressed.
Referred to. People are never addressed by their pronouns.
Him needs to shut up.
Parker Smith
She/Her
Department of Defense Black Budget Coordinator
867-5309 ext. 1
Questions?
I mean... Those kinds of officers could do with being bothered every now and then. It's like with cats. If you let the officers go without shenanigans they get arrogant. I think the appropriate rate is something like 1 bothering per 6 months for every 20 specialists under them? That seems harsh but really good specialists can bother their entire chain of command in one go!
Trolling or stupid? Trolling...or stupid? I just can't tell anymore.
Wow, did you rub all 3 brain cells together to come up with that? Your mommy must be so proud.
It says email signatures.
And good; it's ridiculous, virtue-signalling bullshit and you've got to let it go.
It’s useful for people with unisex names like Taylor, Chris, or Jordan, especially in email, where you may not have any face-to-face contact.
Or for people with names from cultures not associated with English naming standards such as Chinese or Indian cultures working in western companies or governments.
Pop quiz anti-pronouners! 星辰 Xīng Chén, girl or boy? 美莉 Měi Lì, girl or boy?? Would you like to buy a pronoun now?
The first is male, the second is female, but I study Chinese so that's not very fair of me.
Yes, that's a reasonable position.
Yeah, turns out reality is more nuanced than that.
I'm been told that it is not just virtue-signaling (it is), but that it is also a virtue (allyship) in action. Normalizing sharing that information make it easier for people that have a more complex relationship with their gender than I do.
You're expressing a VERY strong negative reaction on words in an email signature. Why are you so threatened by what someone puts in their email signature? How does it challenge or change what you are that you've put so much thought into it to get this angry about it?
Because it's very, very silly identity politics and the majority of people agree. You've got to let it go and focus on important things, like the insane and ever-increasing wealth inequality.
Identity politics for email signatures? There was no federal policy around email signatures like this until folks like you decided to make it politics forcing removal.
Ah yes, folks like me, of course.
Do you find my statement offensive? Are you not celebrating this new policy? How would you not be folks that share your mindset be like you?
I don't know if celebrating is the right word. I'm not American and would never have voted for Trump, but in isolation this seems fairly benign and I think a majority of people will be glad to hear it. You might disagree, that's fine, I'm not interested in an extended argument about it.