Federal Workers Have Until 5pm to Drop Pronoun Notes

Government employees have been told to remove notes about their pronoun preferences from their email signatures and documents by 5pm Friday. The memos said the action is required to comply with President Trump's executive orders issued on his first day in office intended to dismantle diversity and equity programs, ABC News reports. The directive went out to staff members of Department of Energy, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Department of Transportation—which is occupied by the Potomac plane crash at the moment. It wasn't immediately clear if other agencies received the order.

The orders include instructions on how to edit email signatures, per ABC. A memo that went out Wednesday by the Office of Personnel Management told officials to "Review agency email systems such as Outlook and turn off features that prompt users for their pronouns." One employee said the note was an unwelcome first. "In my decade-plus years at CDC I've never been told what I can and can't put in my email signature," the recipient said. (More pronouns stories.)