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.”
