Air Force backtracks Hegseth pronoun ban after realizing it violates Biden law
The Air Force walked back a Trump administration ban on pronouns in its official communications after realizing it ran afoul of a Biden-era defense policy bill that bars the Pentagon from establishing any pronoun policies.
In a memo dated last Wednesday, Gwendolyn DeFilippi, the Air Force's acting assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs, said the ban on preferred pronouns was "rescinded."
The ban, announced in an early February memo from DeFilippi, ordered the Air Force to "immediately" stop using "preferred pronouns" in any official communications, including "email signature blocks, memoranda, letters, papers, social media, official websites" and other official correspondence.
The Air Force said this week that it changed course after realizing the pronoun ban was in violation of the 2024 annual defense policy bill, which bans the Defense Department from making any pronoun policy – whether for or against their official use.
"The Department of the Air Force updated the guidance to comply with federal law after it was brought to our attention the policy was not in line with the fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act," a spokesperson for the Air Force said.
The bill, which sets down the official policy outlining how each year's military budget will be put to use, prohibits the military from either requiring or barring the "identification of gender or personal pronouns in official correspondence."
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In late January, federal employees from multiple departments received emails from the Trump administration ordering them to scrub pronouns from their email signatures.
Hegseth wages anti-DEI campaign
The ban on pronouns came amid Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's sweeping push to expunge all diversity, equity and inclusion policies from the military.
Hegseth also canceled identity months, like Black History Month, from Pentagon policy and ordered hundreds of books pulled from the shelves of libraries at military schools and the Naval Academy Library.
In a move widely condemned by Democratic lawmakers and LGBTQ advocates, the Trump administration also banned transgender people from enlisting in the military.
The Department was also forced to backtrack after an order from Hegseth to delete all DEI-related content from official websites provoked outrage. The directive saw pages covering topics from Jackie Robinson to the Navajo Code Talkers to the Tuskegee Airmen taken down, with "dei" appearing in their URLs. After the backlash, some were reinstated, but many remain down.
'They don't seem to care if it's legal'
Alex Wagner, a former assistant secretary of the Air Force, said the backtrack meant the military under Hegseth, "finally let the lawyers into some of their decision making."
In late 2021, the Air Force updated its official style guide – called the Tongue and Quill – to allow its members to "include pronouns in their signature block," according to an archived screenshot of the announcement. The original link has now been taken down.
Wagner said pronoun policy was barely an "afterthought" during his time in Air Force leadership. Most of the concern about it came, not from the force, but from Republican lawmakers who "assumed this was an all-consuming exercise that took our focus off of warfighting, which it absolutely did not."
"This was a minor amendment to a writing style guide,” he said. "It never came up, except in preparation to testify before Congress."
Amid the department-wide push to wipe out DEI, the Pentagon under Hegseth was glossing over the legality of its actions, he said.
"They don't seem to care if it's legal or not and aren't really stopping to ask."