The State Department has added pronouns to employees’ email address lines, The Daily Signal has learned.
One signature viewed by The Daily Signal inaccurately identified a man with “She/Her/Hers” pronouns. It is unclear exactly when or why the policy was enacted.
Associated Press reporter Matt Lee flagged the occurrence during a Thursday briefing with deputy State Department spokesman Vedant Patel, pressing Patel as to why pronouns had been added to the “from” field of State Department employee emails.
“Have you gotten any emails from any of your colleagues before you came out here… since about noon or so?” Lee asked Patel, to which Patel responded, “What’s your question? My email? I’m not going to pull up my email from the podium.”
“You don’t have to show it to me, I want to know if you noticed anything different in the ‘from’ line, where it gives the sender,” Lee responded.
When Patel said he was not aware of anything different, Lee told him: “Within the last hour and a half… the State Department’s internal email system—and I tested this, so I know that it’s true—has added pronouns to people’s—not their signature—but to where it says from. Why?”
“This is not something that anybody has a choice about,” he added, “and so I’m wondering why and who made this decision.”
“I’d like to know why this would not be an optional thing,” the Associated Press reporter continued, before pointing out that many of the pronouns are inaccurate. “The problem is that a lot of them or at least some of them so far, as I’ve been able to tell, are wrong. They’re giving the wrong pronouns. So men are being identified as women and women as men.”
“This has nothing to do with whatever transgender or anything like that,” he added, “but It’s ridiculous.”
The State Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Daily Signal.
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