Rep. Jim Jordan Is Really Mad About Gender-Neutral Pronouns, Also Doesn’t Know What a Pronoun Is

Now that the new class of freshman lawmakers have been sworn in, the House of Representatives is set to revise its official rules. The new rules package includes ethics reforms, introduces new protections for whistleblowers, establishes a new subcommittee to investigate economic disparity in the U.S., and other sweeping changes.

The new rules also swap out gender-specific pronouns and other references for neutral language. And some Republicans are predictably, ignorantly, unnecessarily mad about it.

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted that the measure is “stupid” and signed his tweet “A father, son, and brother.” (Signing a tweet is a major dad move, to be fair.)

Of course, doing away with gendered language at work doesn’t change who McCarthy is. It doesn’t dictate what language he is allowed to use. This change would impact him in absolutely no way. It just alters some of the language in the House’s code of conduct. Changes include swapping things like “chairman” for “chair” and replaces “he or she” with the person’s title and, in one case, “themself.”

There’s also one section in the code of conduct that talks about a rule regarding lawmakers’ family members and these new rules would change wordings like “father and mother” to just “parent.”

Rep. Jim Jordan posted an incensed tweet about these “banned words,” claiming Democrats in Congress are trying “banning ‘gendered’ pronouns.”

First of all, no one is banning anything. Again, this is literally just changing some of the language in one document. It doesn’t change anything about Jim Jordan’s or anyone else’s daily personal or professional life, but it does establish a degree of inclusivity for future nonbinary members of Congress (and we did just see our first nonbinary person elected to office on a state level in Oklahoma!), as well as for lawmakers’ families.

Also, Jim Jordan is awfully up-in-arms about pronouns when, judging by that tweet, he doesn’t even know what they are.

Why be accurate when you can be angry at nothing, amirite?

(via Axios, image: Graeme Jennings – Pool/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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