Elon Musk and Texas Governor Greg Abbott are cheering the firing of a state employee who dared to include his pronouns in his work email signature.
Abbott went on X to brag about the firing, writing “A Texas state employee refused to remove pronouns from email signature. He was fired before noon.”
Musk hyped up the firing, which was first reported by the Austin American-Statesman, with two fire emojis. The billionaire has himself laid off thousands of federal employees through the Department of Government Efficiency in recent weeks.
The employee, Frank Zamora, was booted from his job as a program manager at the Texas Real Estate Commission (TREC) after refusing to comply with a new rule banning pronouns in email signatures.
TREC instated the rule after Abbott ordered state agencies to purge “woke gender ideologies,” his version of Donald Trump’s executive order to “restore biological truth” to the federal government.
In response to his firing, Zamora told The Guardian, “I felt that this order was strictly passed down to appease a certain political movement, and that it was strictly done, essentially, to win a culture war.”
He pointed out that “pronouns are grammar” and “a function of almost every sentence that we speak.”
Zamora tried to communicate the same point when he announced to TREC that he would refuse to comply with the new rule, writing in a letter that, “in the grand scheme of things, the layout of an email signature block is a fairly innocuous and inconsequential piece of our daily duties.”
“It is clear that this latest directive is part of a broader effort to wipe out the acknowledgement of non-binary, intersex and transgender persons throughout Texas as well as sending the societal message that these individuals are not accepted in this state,” Zamora wrote.
TREC declined to compromise, giving him a choice between removing the pronouns, resigning, or being terminated. He was let go in the first week of February.
Asked about Abbott and Musk’s glee over his firing, Zamora saw it as nothing more than self-serving opportunism.
“They are doing what they must to appease the groups that have kept them in power,” Zamora said.
