Federal workers told to remove pronouns from email signatures in Trump anti-DEI effort

Getting “pink-slipped” may soon take on a new meaning.

Executive branch employees have been ordered to cut gender pronouns out of their email signatures, memos obtained by ABC News and other outlets show, apparently pursuant to anti-DEI executive orders President Trump signed soon after being sworn in as the 47th president.

Agencies included in the directive — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Transportation Department and the Energy Department among them — informed workers to cut out the once-ubiquitous “he/him,” “she/her,” “they/them” and variations on such from communications, grant applications or other official documents, ABC reported.

“Pronouns and any other information not permitted in the policy must be removed from CDC/ATSDR employee signatures by 5 p.m. ET on Friday,” the message to CDC employees read.

Department of Energy employees asked for DEI “language in Federal discourse, communications and publications” to be excised, according to ABC.

The federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) also fired off a memo telling agencies to review “email systems such as Outlook and turn off features that prompt users for their pronouns.”

The Post has reached out to OPM for comment.

On Day One, Trump ordered an end to “radical and wasteful government DEI programs,” calling on OPM, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Justice Department to end “illegal” diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility “mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities.”

He also took action to eliminate “gender ideology extremism” and restore “biological truth to the federal government,” declaring it “the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.”

“These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality,” the second executive order stated.

It added: “Agencies shall remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology, and shall cease issuing such statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications or other messages. Agency forms that require an individual’s sex shall list male or female, and shall not request gender identity.”

Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio scrapped US passport applications allowing Americans to designate their gender identity as “X,” rather than male or female.

The executive orders were referenced in the memos distributed on Friday.

Upon taking office in January 2021, then-President Joe Biden had signed an order to prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.

Then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki later defended the order when it caught flak from critics who said it would eliminate sex-segregated spaces for women and lead to the end of girl’s sports.

“The president’s belief is that trans rights are human rights, and that’s why he signed that executive order,” Psaki told reporters in February 2021.

The Biden White House also courted several transgender influencers such as Dylan Mulvaney and other proponents of so-called “gender-affirming” care over the past four years — leading to fierce backlash from critics who argued sex-transition surgeries and hormone therapies were dangerous and irreversible for minors.

Vice President Kamala Harris further courted progressives by making use of pronouns in her public appearances, introducing herself at an LGBTQ roundtable in 2022 by saying, “I am Kamala Harris, my pronouns are she and her, and I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit.”

She later asked staffers for her failed 2024 campaign to list whether they were one of nine gender-neutral options when applying — and was exposed for having backed “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners” in one of her Republican opponent’s most successful attack ads.

“Even the liberal media was shocked Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens,” the narrator in the ad stated. “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Since Trump’s victory, however, at least two high-profile Democrats — onetime Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Bronx and Queens Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who once proudly displayed pronouns in their social media profiles have removed them.

Buttigieg scrubbed his own “he/him” designation as recently as Thursday after reports that he was considering a Senate run in the swing state of Michigan.