White House Website Allows Users to Specify Pronouns for First Time

Posted on by Mirah Borden

As soon as President Biden was sworn into office, major changes came to the White House Website.

What We Know:

  • The day President Joe Biden was sworn in, the White House website was updated to allow visitors to specify what pronouns they use. LGBTQ advocates see the change as a small but symbolic example of the Biden administration reaching out to transgender and nonbinary Americans.

  • On Wednesday, the contact form at WhiteHouse.gov added a drop-down menu with pronoun options, including “she/her,” “he/him,” and “they/them.” Users can also select “other” and write in their own selections or indicate they “prefer not to share” their pronouns. The list of prefixes has also been updated to include the gender-neutral “Mx.” along with “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” and “Ms.”

  • Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, former White House LGBTQ liaison under the Obama administration and the first openly transgender person to work as a White House staffer, said, “It’s truly wonderful to see the White House so sensitively and prominently signal inclusion.”

“Allowing visitors, whether transgender, nonbinary or cisgender-identified, to indicate their preferred pronouns when visiting the home of President Biden, demonstrates the kind of welcoming place 1600 Pennsylvania will now be for all Americans,” Freedman-Gurspan told NBC News.

  • The site now includes a Spanish language version of the White House’s communications, a page that went dark when former President Donald Trump took office. The relaunch came the same day President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took the oath of office. Harris is now the first female, first Black, and first South Asian vice president.

This is a small step that President Joe Biden and his administration have already taken after being in office for one day.

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