‘Triggered’ State Department Employees Offered Therapy To Deal With Wrong Pronouns

State Department employees who said they were “triggered” when they received emails labeling them by the wrong pronouns are seeking therapy to get over their shock.

The pronoun debacle happened while “testing a new feature that will provide users with the option to include their preferred pronouns in their Global Address List profile,” wrote Chief Information Officer Kelly E. Fletcher in an internal email. “During the test, the feature inadvertently went live, and a large number of employees had randomly assigned pronouns added to their profiles.”

That means pronouns such as she/her/hers, he/him/his, and they/them/theirs began appearing in email “from” fields at random, without regard to an employee’s actual preferred pronouns, or if they even wanted to list pronouns at all.

“I want to stress that the intent behind making this feature available is to make our systems more inclusive and provide employees with options — not to make decisions for them,” Fletcher wrote. “I recognize that this error had the opposite effect, and again, I am very sorry.”

The Washington Free Beacon reported “shock and confusion” among some of the staff, with one employee stating, “This is distracting from the work that we are actually supposed to be doing. A lot of people here have been triggered today.”

The department encouraged “any employee who feels hurt or upset as a result of this unfortunate mistake,” to seek professional counseling through the State Department’s Employee Consultation Service.

AP reporter Matt Lee caught State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel off guard when he asked about the glitch at Thursday’s briefing, and demanded to know why adding pronouns to an email should be mandated by the department.

“I’d like to know why this would not be an optional thing… the problem is that a lot of them, or at least some of them so far, as I’ve been able to tell, are wrong,” Lee said. “They’re giving the wrong pronouns. So men are being identified as women and women as men… and this has nothing to do with whatever transgender or anything like that… but it’s ridiculous.”

After a heated exchange, Patel said he would “look into” the problem.

Later, spokesperson Matthew Miller tweeted, “The State Department’s Bureau of Information Resource Management (IRM) is aware of the recent issues with user profiles on Microsoft Outlook and working to remedy the situation. This change was unintentional and the bureau is working to correct this immediately.”

The glitch is expected to be remedied by Saturday, according to the Free Beacon.

Watch the video of State Department Spokesman Vedant Patel above.

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