The Trump administration has made it clear that they will not respond to emails from reporters who bother to stipulate their preferred pronouns.

"As a matter of policy, we do not respond to reporters with pronouns in their bios," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told a New York Times reporter who had asked an unrelated question. Leavitt apparently means business; White House comms staffers have declined to answer several inquiries on this basis, according to the Times.

This is a kind of rebellion against an increasingly common progressive accommodation of gender nonconforming individuals—the idea being that there are some people whose outward gender presentation does not match their self-identification, and if we all adopted the habit of stating our preferred pronouns outright, we would spare these people from having to correct everyone else all the time. Conservatives charge that pronoun listers are overcomplicating a fundamental simple matter: There are just two genders, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, it is perfectly obvious who belongs to which pronouns. On the other hand, sometimes it's not obvious whether you are emailing a man or a woman—some names are gender neutral.

Thus we find ourselves in a situation where a new, empowered conservative movement has taken something that is, charitably speaking, kind of cringe and annoying, and attacked it in a maximally dramatic fashion. It's weird and off-putting to get really worked up about pronoun policing, and it's also weird and off-putting to get worked up about policing pronoun policing. Can everyone calm down?

They/Them

Speaking of people who need to calm down about pronouns… a moment from CNN's town hall with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) on Wednesday night caught fire on social media. In the clip, an audience participant corrects host Anderson Cooper, who naively assumes the woman (?) goes by she. Instead, the question-asker demands a they pronoun.

What's funny about this exchange is that the subsequent question for Sanders was something along the lines of: How can the Democrats win back various demographic groups—men, minorities, etc.—who are fleeing the party in record numbers? What Democrats really need is an attitude adjustment: It's precisely this condescending, hectoring schoolmarm routine that has so thoroughly repelled voters, particularly young males. Just be normal is an underrated rule of politics. Telling someone you want to be called they/them just strikes a lot of people as abnormal.