UPDATE—March 18, 2025: We have already heard from sources inside the FBI that as soon as this article was published, it was read by senior FBI officials and they immediately took care of the problem. Less than 24 hours after they learned about it. There will be no more questions asked about gender identity in any background investigations being conducted by agents. The swiftness with which this was corrected should make the public confident that the new leadership of the FBI is really intent on fixing the agency. In fact, the swiftness with which the White House and the Trump administration has been acting to reform the federal government is simply amazing and, quite frankly, refreshing, in a town and with a federal bureaucracy that normally works at a glacial pace so slow that it makes a snail look like the Warner Brothers Road Runner.

I don’t envy FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino in their new jobs running the agency.

Getting control of an agency with over 37,000 employees and rooting out the worst excesses of political bias and warped gender ideology that has corrupted it is a monumental job.

One of the things they should know is that some of their agents or their supervisors still haven’t gotten the message that there is a new sheriff in town, and they need to change their behavior accordingly. That includes not asking woke questions about “gender identity.”

This was demonstrated just recently by some information I received from a very reliable source, a former government employee. My source was contacted by an FBI agent doing an employment background investigation on someone the source knows.

Such background investigations are one of the regular tasks of the FBI. They are routinely done for prospective federal employees, including political appointees chosen by a president. I had to undergo such a background investigation twice when I went to work in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department and when President George W. Bush nominated me to the Federal Election Commission.

The FBI contacts friends, family, and current or former work colleagues and asks them a series of standard questions about the character, fitness, and loyalty of the subject of the investigation. Due to federal laws on discrimination, agents normally ask whether the applicant has ever exhibited bias against an individual based on race, color, sex, national origin, or religion. Those are the categories specifically protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But my source was asked about an additional “bias” that is not in the law but is part of the woke gender ideology that has infested our government, our institutions, our businesses, and sadly our culture. The source was asked whether the subject of the FBI investigation had ever exhibited bias for any of those standard, legally defined statutory reasons but also due to “gender identity.”

Keep in mind that one of the executive orders that newly inaugurated President Donald Trump signed (and not with an autopen) on his first day in office, Jan. 20, was “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

In that order, Trump recognized what anyone with common sense does but the radical Left denies—the scientific, biological fact that there are two sexes, male and female, and not a “vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex” as the president says in the order. Gender ideology “replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true.”

Trump’s executive order directed all federal government agencies, offices, and departments—which would include the FBI—to eliminate “gender,” “gender identity,” and “gender ideology” from all “statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages.” All agency forms can only require that an individual’s sex be listed as “male or female.”

The executive order also specifically addressed Title VII, and ordered federal agencies to “immediately issue guidance” to correct the prior administration’s “legally untenable” decision to include gender identity as a protected category in government activities. In order to comply with that order, the FBI would have to eliminate its policy and practice of asking whether an individual has exhibited any “bias” based on someone’s “gender identity.”

As my source told me, that this prohibited question is still being asked in the middle of March, two months into the Trump administration, would “seem to open a backdoor for slowing or refusing clearances for people who don’t believe in gender ideology.”

If you voice publicly your belief, for example, my source said, that congressional Rep. “Sarah” (née Tim) McBride, D-Del., is not a woman because he is really a biological man, then you’re taking that factual position—which is reality. This could be used against you as being “biased” against someone based on their perceived gender identity.

It easy “to imagine even worse scenarios,” says my source, and “we all know how this question crept insidiously into the clearance process over the past few years.”

I don’t necessarily blame this FBI agent—I have no doubt the agent was using a standard question form and doing what the agent was told by the agent’s supervisor. But I do blame the FBI managers and supervisors, the middle and upper management personnel who should have already corrected this but have not done so. It is many of these same up-the-chain bureaucrats who have been the source of the bias, problems, and corrupt practices we have seen over the past few years according to FBI whistleblowers.

So, Patel and Bongino—here is another one to add to your long list of problems at the FBI that you need to fix. The American people are hoping you will be successful in the foreboding task you have before you: reforming the most powerful, and therefore most potentially dangerous, law enforcement agency in the country.

Republished from The Daily Signal.