The State Department has added pronouns for each of its employees to its email system, in the process mislabeling the genders of at least a few officials. The change took place abruptly and without advance notice today, causing some confusion internally, a State Department source told National Review.
The State Department’s top spokesman, Matthew Miller, said in a tweet that the move was an unintentional error, which it is working to fix. Either way, the incident followed a series of steps taken since 2021 to embed diversity, equity, and inclusion principles at the core of American diplomacy, and this episode is also not the department’s first pronoun-related gaffe.
The Associated Press’s Matt Lee was the first to reveal the change publicly, raising it at the tail end of today’s State Department press briefing. NR has independently confirmed the change. In fact, the State Department’s new email gender-labeling change has assigned incorrect gender pronouns to some department officials, according to an email viewed by NR.
In a three-minute-long back-and-forth with principal deputy spokesman Vedant Patel, the AP’s Lee attempted to get him to acknowledge the change, which is visible both to State Department employees and those whom they email externally.
But even Patel seemed not to have been aware of the change, with Lee eventually asking, “I want to know if you’ve noticed anything different in the ‘From’ line, where it gives the sender.” Patel responded: “This would be a lot better if you would just ask what your question was.”
Lee responded, “So you haven’t noticed anything?” to which Patel replied, “No.”
“Okay, so within the last hour and a half, two hours, the State Department’s internal email system has added pronouns to people’s, not their signature,” but to wherever it says ‘from,’” Lee continued, noting that the change did not seem to be optional and that many people have told him that many of the labels are simply incorrect.
“Men are being identified as women, and women are as men. And this has nothing to do with whatever transgender or anything like that,” Lee said. “But, it’s ridiculous.”
Patel, who stated again that he hadn’t seen the change before the press briefing, eventually promised to look into it and get back to him. “I will look into this. I’m not aware,” Patel said. “Thanks everybody, happy Thursday.”
The State Department referred NR to Miller’s tweet, which said that its bureau of information and resource management is aware of “recent issues with user profile on Microsoft Outlook.” Miller added, “This change was unintentional and the bureau is working to correct this immediately.”
Alongside its ongoing responsibilities to advance American interests on the global stage, the department has undertaken a long series of measures to bring itself in line with left-wing ideas about race and gender and therefore comply with President Biden’s executive orders on equity. “While equity is not an entirely new concept for either” State or USAID, “distinguishing it from equality is,” a Biden-era assessment from the Government Accountability Office stated. “State officials also said advancing equity is something that the entire agency, and not just a few offices, must undertake,” the document continued.
In May of 2021, the department urged employees, in an internal guidance document obtained by National Review, to “consider a shift in language to avoid making assumptions that can be offensive to transgender and gender nonconforming employees” and therefore use “words like everyone, colleagues, and esteemed guests rather than ladies and gentlemen.”
These efforts have previously caused embarrassment for the department, such as when its official Twitter account posted about celebrating “International Pronouns Day,” by sharing an article that discussed the use of “ze/zir/zirs” pronouns. The tweet, which came just a few months after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, caused ridicule online, and State declined to tweet about International Pronouns Day the following year.