The Department of Justice is making a clean break from the woke era, issuing a new policy that bans employees from adding “preferred pronouns” to their official email signatures. The move follows President Donald Trump’s January executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which reaffirms that there are only two sexes — male and female — and rejects gender identity ideology in federal policy.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche sent a department-wide memo Tuesday spelling out the rules. “Extraneous content, such as preferred pronouns, motivational quotes, and GIFs, shall not be used in the signature block,” the memo read. Blanche added that employees may include the official DOJ logo below the last line of their signature, but personal flourishes are now off-limits.
The memo made clear that the Department’s communications must reflect “reality” and uphold public trust. “In pursuit of its law and order agenda each day, the Department deals with facts. To maintain the public trust, the Department’s communications must therefore reflect reality,” it stated. All DOJ correspondence — internal and external — must now be “oriented towards the mission of the department” and aligned with announced administration policies.
Employees have until August 25 to comply.
Trump’s January order, which serves as the backbone of the new policy, leaves little room for interpretation. It declares that biological sex is “not changeable and grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” The order warns that erasing sex from language and policy “has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.”
The president’s directive also states that laws designed to protect women’s opportunities are undermined when “woman” is redefined according to self-identified gender. “Replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts” transforms these protections into tools for erasing them, it says.
Under the new DOJ policy, employees will no longer be able to use their official email as a platform for political or ideological messaging, whether through pronouns, slogans, or images. The stated goal is to ensure consistency, professionalism, and alignment with the Trump administration’s broader push to root gender ideology out of federal government operations.
The change is part of a sweeping rollback of policies embraced under previous administrations that promoted gender identity concepts across federal agencies. By codifying biological reality into official policy, the Trump White House is setting the stage for similar reforms in other departments — potentially reaching everything from hiring policies to public-facing documents.
Critics of pronoun usage in official government communications argue that it compels employees to affirm concepts they may not believe in and injects ideology into otherwise neutral work environments. Supporters of the DOJ’s move see it as a return to professionalism and factual accuracy. Opponents, however, are expected to denounce the policy as discriminatory and damaging to workplace inclusivity.
Regardless of the backlash, the DOJ’s stance is now crystal clear: federal communications will stick to the facts, and the facts, according to the administration, are grounded in biological sex.
This new directive may spark similar reforms across the federal bureaucracy, solidifying a cultural and policy shift that Trump promised during his campaign — one aimed squarely at reversing what he called “the unhealthy road” paved by gender ideology in government.
With the deadline looming, DOJ employees now have less than two weeks to scrub their email signatures of anything that could be seen as ideological — and the administration appears ready to enforce the policy just as vigorously as it rolled it out.