State Department apologizes for causing pronoun butthurt.

Washington Free Beacon: State Department Offers Counseling To Misgendered Employees Triggered By Email Pronoun Debacle.

The State Department will offer counseling to any employee "who feels hurt or upset" by a system-wide email glitch that temporarily assigned random and often incorrect gender pronouns to staff.

The State Department is offering free therapy to "any employee who feels hurt or upset as a result of this unfortunate mistake," according to an internal email that went out to employees on Friday. Many State Department employees were "triggered" on Thursday, when emails from colleagues suddenly began to include random pronouns, like, "She/her/hers" and "He/Him/His" in the "from" line.

The pronouns were randomly assigned, with men being given female pronouns and vice versa, due to a "pronoun glitch" in the department’s system, the Washington Free Beacon first reported.

Those upset by the misgendering are encouraged to contact the State Department’s Employee Consultation Service "to speak to a professional counselor."

"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," Kelly E. Fletcher, the State Department’s chief information officer, wrote in the email. "I recognize that this error had the opposite effect, and again, I am very sorry."

RT: US State Department offers counseling to staff after ‘pronoun glitch’. 

In a tweet later on Thursday, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that “issues with user profiles on Microsoft Outlook” had caused the error.

State Department blames MS Outlook user profiles? 🤣 Sure, why not?

I'm very upset over this misuse of pronouns. Where do I go for my free therapy and, hopefully, benzos?