Summary
Federal employees at multiple agencies were ordered to remove pronouns from email signatures by Friday, following executive orders signed by Donald Trump to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
Agencies including the CDC, Department of Transportation, and Department of Energy issued directives citing the new policy.
Some employees expressed frustration, with one CDC worker calling it unprecedented.
The Office of Personnel Management also instructed agencies to disable pronoun prompts in email systems, marking another step in Trump’s broader rollback of DEI initiatives.
You may not be my opposite, but the word ‘you’ is the opposite of the word ‘I’.
Why? By what reasoning?
Let’s say it’s the two of us. Between the two of us, we can use ‘I’ and ‘you’ and they might be opposites in that the opposite of ‘I’ is ‘not me’. But if we added a third person, then we got ‘I’ ‘you’ ‘him’ and now both ‘you’ and ‘him’ are both ‘not me’. So what logic makes ‘you’ the opposite of ‘I’?
Most pronouns have counterparts that I was using as my reasoning for identifying opposites. He/she, us/them, you/I.