See update below!
Trump has ordered federal employees to remove pronouns from email signatures by end of day today. “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,” according to a message sent Friday morning to CDC staff. ABC News has confirmed that federal employees with the Department of Transportation and at the Department of Energy also received the memo. On his first day in office, Trump signed a pair of executive orders calling for an end to what his administration called “radical and wasteful DEI programs.” The orders moreover emphasized the move by the administration to restore “biological truth to the federal government.” Both orders were referenced in the Friday memos.
In April 2023, I wrote about the problem of compelled speech at the NIH (see NIH and the Tyranny of Compelled Speech). In that essay, I provided readers a link to an NIH document “Gender Pronouns & Their Use in Workplace Communications.” When I clicked on the link to the NIH document today it’s 404, a page unburdened by what has been. Fortunately, I took a screen shot of the sample signature blocks employees were instructed to use in their emails. You can find the sample signature blocks in my essay. They’re more than ridiculous, they’re tyrannical.
The NIH adapted its pronoun list from the “Gender Pronouns Guide from UW Milwaukee LGBTQ+ Resource Center.” I clicked on that link and it, too, is 404. As with the NIH document, I grabbed a screen shot from this page, as well, which you can also find in the essay cited above.
UW Milwaukee and public universities across the nation receive federal money, so Trump’s actions are sweeping and taking hold nationally. And what a welcome development this is. Ending the practice of compelled speech and the chill that hysteria over pronouns puts into the air is a great victory for liberty. The man has been in office only a few days and already our society has become more open and democratic. I have been waiting a very long time for a president this dedicated to the principle of freedom and reason. (Readers really should spend some time reviewing these executive orders. They are amazing.)
Being a public employee, one of the concerns I have had over the last several years is having to die on that hill. If you sincerely can’t determine whether I am a man then your gender detection faculty has been corrupted. Humans are generally quite accurate at determining the gender of others based on body shape, facial features, movement, and voice. Women do a bit better than men, but studies suggest that people of either gender can correctly identify gender from facial images alone with around 95 percent accuracy, depending on factors like facial expressions, image quality, and lighting. When other cues such as voice and body motion are included, accuracy can increase further. If you know my gender but demand my pronouns anyway, then you are part of the reason why others have corrupted gender detection faculties. In the vast majority of cases, this is an exercise in compelled speech to advance and ideology. A free people must resist this.
Long ago, I became determined to never put my pronouns in my email signature or announce my pronouns at meetings or before a classroom, not just because I don’t subscribe to the ideology (it’s woo woo), but because it’s unethical for me or others to pressure individuals into rehearsing in a public setting speech codes associated with ideologies to which they may not subscribe. This is especially true with respect to students who may feel compelled to follow the direction of their instructor because he is an authority figure. Students are a captured population in the sense that many will feel like they can’t leave the room and thus feel compelled to speak in the manner their instructor is requesting. Organizations should not be about forcing employees to convey ideology. It is a subtle form of tyranny, but it is tyranny nonetheless.
Speaking of being unburdened by what has been….
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Update (2.1.2025): This note is following up on the above concerning the removal of those ridiculous pronoun blocks in emails sent by federal employees and the taking down of pages promulgating the insanity of gender ideology. Trump’s action is the equivalent of purging the federal government of Scientology or the woo-woo of some other pseudoscientific ideology. This is a battle for the ages, as the anti-Enlightenment forces occupying our policy-making and, more deeply, sense-making institutions, are finally on the run.
Among the items you will find in this instantiation of panicked reporting by PBS is the taking down of public health information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website, including lessons on building supportive school environments for transgender and nonbinary kids. Those who read Freedom and Reason and other platforms concerned with saving Western civilization from ideologues already know that such curricula testifies to the extent of the progressive project to reprogram vulnerable children in our public schools to produce adults who take gender ideology on faith and who will then support the policies of those who are promulgating the postmodern rot of queer theory.
While there are kids who identify as transgender or nonbinary (and parents, counselors, and doctors who identify them as such), no such person exists in our species. The existence of such a person as such is a purely ideological construction—and rejecting that construction does not erase the existence of those who have internalize it any more than denying the tenets of Islam erase the existence of those who identify as Muslim (just to get that bit of emotional and reputational blackmail out of the way). The claim of transgender or nonbinary existence is not a nonfalsifiable proposition of the sort that marks the presence of a true religious faith (e.g., the thetan in Scientology). Materially, there are two genders: male and female. This is incontrovertible; these facts have been confirmed: males cannot be female, females cannot be males, and neither can be both genders nor genderless. The natural history of our species completely contradicts claims to the contrary.
Indeed, the fact of the gender binary is essential to the evolution of all life that reproduces through a cycle where a gamete (haploid reproductive cell) with a single set of chromosomes combines with another gamete forming a zygote. This zygote then develops into an organism made up of cells with two sets of chromosomes (diploid)—and the cycle begins again. This includes not only all animals, but all plants, as well (however complex the cycle, so don’t trouble me with mosses and the like).
We cannot continue as a rational, scientifically-based civilization is we allow the truth of the life cycle to be denied by our governments and other public institutions. Churches and other religious institutions can deny such truths all they want. Individuals can deny truth, too. It’s their civil right to deny reality. But they cannot be allowed to corrupt public institutions with the falsehoods that obscure this truth. These institutions must work from scientific truth if they are to advance the material interests of the people they are established to represent in a secular society. See, not only are these forces anti-science, they are anti-civil rights and anti-democratic, to boot.
The Trump Administration is not at war with science but with science denialism, the postmodern rot that has corrupted our sense-making and policy-making institutions—not just in biology, but in every domain of knowledge and action, knowledge defined here as validated belief and action. This is one of the most significant, perhaps the most significant development in my lifetime. I have been sitting here for years feeling helpless while progressives have commandeered our public institutions and injected into the bloodstream of the masses a false narrative about the way the world works.
How thrilled I am to sit here today, now an old man, a man who now has hope for the future, watching a leader and movement standing up to the collective insanity that has warped mass consciousness and the workings of the institutions vital to the advancement of knowledge.
freedom and reason 