Trump Admin Deletes Video Explaining Grammatical Concept of Pronouns in War Against DEI

In 2015, a federal worker named Katherine Spivey gave colleagues a presentation about how to “write plainly,” so that the general public can more easily understand content on government websites. One of her pieces of advice, among many, was to “use pronouns” such as the word “you” to describe the reader rather than jargon like “beneficiary” or “purchaser.”

“There’s already a great barrier between citizens and the government,” Spivey said. “Remember, your reader is a person, not an entity … use pronouns to speak directly to your readers. It requires a lot less work and it requires a lot less words.” 

Spivey’s presentation had nothing to do with gender identity, gender pronouns, diversity, equity, or inclusion. It was about the broad concept of “pronouns,” the part of speech we (a pronoun!) use constantly. And yet, after Donald Trump was inaugurated, the government webpage archiving a video of Spivey’s presentation was first edited to remove a timestamp link that went to the section of the video about “pronouns.” Later, the page archiving the video was deleted entirely (a copy of the video is still available on YouTube and on the Internet Archive).

The tweak is one of hundreds that have been revealed across government via Github’s commit tracking, which shows version changes to code, websites, and other projects managed on the site. Github is also revealing a widespread, scattershot effort to not only change government policies on DEI but also to wholesale nuke language that actually has nothing to do with it and are retroactively changing descriptions of research and events that happened in the past to remove any reference to DEI. The Github pages reveal not only the imprecision with which these changes are being made but also a willingness to literally rewrite and delete history.

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Many of the deletions catalogued on Github demonstrate the pettiness and lengths to which the Trump administration is going to seek and destroy anything  that it could possibly conceive as being related to DEI. They also show that the government has hundreds of employees and contractors who have been tasked with being the anti-DEI police across the entire government. Many of the changes are frivolous, but many of them are not, and represent the destruction of critical institutions, research, and public data.

There are far more alarming deletions than Spivey’s video, of course.

The Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology, an office of the government that determines how the federal government should carry out statistical research to, for example, determine if a federal program is working, has nuked its page about best practices for researching “sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics.” This page had years of research about how to best do basic government research about the American people for the Census, the National Institutes of Health, and other government agencies to “allow for better understanding of how sexual and gender minority populations [are faring] relative to the general or other population groups, including economic, housing, health, and other differences. These insights can lead to potential resources and interventions needed to better serve the community. These data meet critical needs to understand trends within larger population groups.” 

Similarly, the National Institutes of Health deleted a page about the Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office, which has done critical research about the health and wellbeing of LGBTQ+ people. 

It is impossible to catalog everything that has been deleted, tweaked, or scrubbed. But here are some more: 

• The U.S. Web Design System has deleted its pages on inclusive web design, which many web designers referred to when thinking about how to make their websites more accessible. The Github shows that much of the research and underlying principles that went into it were also deleted.
• According to Github, a page about behavioral guidelines for government employees is slated to get rid of a bullet point that says “don’t make derogatory comments on race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity,” though the change has not appeared on the live site yet.
• GSA research about how much money the federal government spends at businesses owned by women, veterans, and other groups as been deleted from the internet
• The description of a government panel at a conference from 2022 about neurodiversity has been edited to remove the term “DEIA” from its description. Similarly, the word “inclusion” has been deleted from a government training about why the Americans with Disabilities Act is important for accessibility at sports venues.