John McWhorter is one of the greatest living experts on the English language. He’s a professor of linguistics at Columbia, a columnist at The New York Times, and a Broadway obsessive. He once told me that he couldn’t do an interview because he was rehearsing a cabaret show for his bungalow colony. It sounded like a scene out of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. But in his day job John thinks about words, about the evolving English language and, most recently, about the recently controversial topic of pronouns.
John McWhorter has a truly independent mind. He has been one of the most outspoken critics of liberalism from the left. His last book was called Woke Racism, so you know where he stands. But now he’s taking a position that will definitely provoke the other side. In his new book, Pronoun Trouble, John makes the provocative case that the English language evolves in ways that don’t always make sense, but that’s okay. And he actually takes it a step further. He says that the wide adoption of they/them in the singular—instead of he/him, or she/her—not only works, but might be a good development.
The stakes of these little words are high. For example, if we as a society did what John suggests, are we disrespecting women and men when we fail to acknowledge in our language who has dealt with the challenges of womanhood or manhood, and who hasn’t?
And what are the consequences of letting children specifically adopt they/them pronouns, especially if it pushes them toward medical transition or simply just confusion? At the same time, how do we create a society that is inclusive and kind, but also reflective of actual reality? And is it even possible to have both? The broader context of this language conversation, of course, is about what can and cannot be said depending on our cultural moment. We talk about this, about that broader context, the state of the woke left—but also the rise of the woke right. I put all of these questions and more to linguist and cultural commentator, my friend John McWhorter.
Click the video above to watch our conversation, or scroll down for an edited transcript.
BW: Pronouns cause a deeply visceral reaction from people. They’re so tiny, and they go off like nuclear bombs. Why is that? What’s at stake in pronouns?
JM: They’re not words. They are little screws. They’re little nails. A word is walrus. A word is serendipity. But I, you, he, she, it—those are technically words. But really, they’re little traffic cops. They keep our thoughts together.
BW: So in 2021 you write a book called Woke Racism at the height of the woke movement. You come out and say not only is wokeness a bad thing, it is a form of racism. Now it’s 2025. Trump is president. And now John McWhorter is writing a book basically embracing they/them.
JM: I think this book is going to irritate a lot of people about two things. One, they/them, because there’s a lot of resistance to that out there. And I think some people think of me as the contrarian, which is almost a euphemism for conservative. They’re waiting for me to say “Stop with this they stuff.” And then I say, “Oh no, I like it.” That frustrates people. Then there’s also a whole other section that maybe we’ll talk about, which is the idea that Billy and me went to the store; Him and me went swimming, are not bad sentences, and the idea that there’s something wrong with them is something that people in wigs and breeches dying of yellow fever made up about 200 years ago. And now here we are, living under the thrall of nonsense from another time. So that’s going to irritate people. I have seen people actually seem to want to throttle me when I put that across. But, contrarian me. And so that’s Pronoun Trouble.
Why John McWhorter likes gender-neutral pronouns:
BW: I think this is counterintuitive for a lot of people who know your work: Why is they/them good, and why should it be here to stay?
JM: If there is an argument that we should look beyond the gender binary—if that is a form of progress—then we need a pronoun that doesn’t specify he-ness and she-ness the way we used to, and if there’s going to be a pronoun like that, you can’t just make up a pronoun.
I wish we could, but you can’t. And so we’re going to use they because they has been used gender neutrally in sentences like, Tell each student they can pick up their paper tomorrow forever. Since Chaucer. So we’ve already been using it that way. Now we can just extend it somewhat. That’s why I like they/them. It’s just fun because it makes our language more like languages that already have a gender-neutral pronoun—like Chinese. Mainly it’s because it’s progressive. Contrary to what some people think, there are progressive aspects of my politics.
On the deeper ramifications of adopting they/them:
BW: When did pronouns become such a thing in popular culture?
JM: Sitting in my office at Columbia, I remember listening to some students who were sitting in a circle out in the hallway. And now that I think of it, I don’t know why they were doing that, but they were always sitting in a circle and they were giving their pronouns. And I remember thinking, This is so peculiar that it must be a thing. There must be a reason behind this. And what it came in with was questioning the gender binary, which was happening on that campus, at least at that same time. And I remember there were male students wearing skirts here and there. And it wasn’t just one person. And I remember thinking, Okay, this is a paradigm shift here. And I remember thinking What an unusual use of they, but I guess that is part and parcel with this new ideology, which was fine with me. That would have been 2013. That’s when I first noticed it.
BW: Isn’t forcing or coercing people to have new norms on language a sort of backdoor way of getting them to change the way they think?
JM: I think that there is an extent to which changing language can make people think in a certain way. That’s what psychology and psycholinguistics have shown again and again. But if the thought processes are not held front and center, if the focus is not on making arguments and changing society, then whatever the associations were with the term you got rid of are going to come floating back down onto the concept.
So, for example, currently I understand why people are saying unhoused, because homeless has certain unfortunate associations. But I’m also old enough to remember that homeless came in to replace bum, and homeless was the most humane, gentle way of expressing it. I remember thinking this makes sense. Homeless has become a slur. And you say unhoused, I get it. It’s so gentle. It’s so humane. It’ll last 15 years and then we’ll need something else. So really, you have to end homelessness, not calling people homeless, that sort of thing.
BW: The deeper underlying issue that’s at stake here is going along to be polite with either preferred pronouns or they/them versus insisting on the assertion of reality—in this case, biological reality. So there’s two layers of this: 1) Is it linguistically possible to use they/them? It seems to me the answer is yes. And 2) What are the deeper ramifications? In other words, what are the stakes of going with he/him for someone that was born female, or going with she/her for someone that was born male? What are the deeper societal implications?
JM: You’re going a place where I don’t have anything glib to say yet.
BW: Well, it doesn’t need to be glib. That’s the beauty of a long-form podcast.
JM: It’s tough, though, because they/them is saying we’re not going to look at whether I’m a boy or a girl. In many languages, that’s the way it is by default. And so that’s one thing. Calling someone who went through male puberty she is much more dislocating to all of us. Because you do seem to be getting into an issue of what is versus what isn’t, and the extent to which you feel that it’s healthy, appropriate, or wise to go along. And I’m still working on that. The whole issue of what is a man? What is a woman? What is a trend? What is permanent? That’s harder. And so, for example, in Pronoun Trouble, I don’t go there because I think it’s just too early. And I didn’t want to write about something that creates so much anger, so much confusion. There are times when you want to see what the trend is.
BW: So is they/them kind of an elegant end-run solution around the knotty question of preferred gendered pronouns?
JM: Yeah, because it means that you’re not making a decision at all. You’re not asking to be called something that might confuse someone, or at least no more than they/them does.
Will the use of they/them endure?
BW: I’ve been wanting to ask you about the the the line between politeness and coerced speech because wokeness, a huge part of the way that it functioned and the way that it got people to go along with it, was in punishing people for small linguistic crimes that were not actually crimes—using the wrong pronoun for somebody, using a word that was out of date, or even frankly saying “all lives matter.” That was unbelievable. People lost their jobs for that, like Tiffany Riley, who was a principal in Vermont. And I think she said either “all lives matter” or “black lives matter, but also all lives matter.” And she was run out of town.
JM: Well, I would say that when someone is called out for what is obviously an attempt to be humanistic and sympathetic to all people, when that is laboriously interpreted as a slur, if you castigate someone for saying “all lives matter” in 2020 or 2021 out of the idea that what we’re supposed to be saying is “black lives matter,” and how dare you put black lives below other lives? It’s a party trick. You’re making something up. It’s a laborious interpretation that you’re only leveling because we human beings can sometimes enjoy hurting each other. And that’s what a lot of 2020 and 2021 was.
BW: I’m thinking about whether they/them will stick around, and I’m trying to untangle it in a way that you seem to have no trouble doing. Because to me, it’s been attendant to this broader frenzy around coerced language that to me, felt oppressive. Now it’s being replaced by other things, which we will talk about. But it’s refreshing and surprising to me that you see it as a separate phenomenon, because I think a lot of people will be like, “Wait, John McWhorter is arguing in favor of they/them. They/them has been at the core of a political movement that he has been opposed to. Help us understand how we can untangle it.”
JM: So for me, they/them, my first thought was: Now we get to have a gender-neutral pronoun like so many languages do. Now we get to be like Chinese. I understand that that won’t work, that there are larger issues here that they/them is connected with. But for me, at first I just thought the language is changing, which is always interesting. I wrote Pronoun Trouble in 2023, which was a while ago now. And I wonder if in movies in the 2050s, people saying they is going to be a sign of the crazy 2020s. I don’t know if it’s going to stay.
Neither of my daughters have embraced it, and they’re both people who love other people, love other kids. They are brilliant, but they’re not nerds. And yet, neither one of them seems to be interested in they. And so maybe it’s just been a trend. I hope not.
BW: Do you ever use they/them for yourself?
JM: No, I’m he. Always. I am not a they/them. Do you?
BW: I’m a she/her. I’ve always been a she/her. I’ll die a she/her.
On the polarization of language norms:
BW: Do you think it is a good or a bad cultural norm to have that kind of thing, to continue on with the preferred declared pronouns in places like our email signatures? Something you want to continue and embrace, or something we should leave behind?
JM: We signal what kinds of people we are in various, almost subconscious ways all the time—in terms of what clothes we wear, in terms of what car we drive. I remember all the people would—when people first started getting vaccinated, at least in my neighborhood, and they stopped masking starting in about May, June of 2021. Often they wore caps saying “I’m not a Republican,” just because they wanted that to be clear. And so using the pronouns now is a way of showing that you’re on board with more fluid conceptions of gender. I don’t see any harm in that. I would see harm if we were forced to do it.
BW: But you could imagine a world where it’s not red and blue America, but it’s they/them America and him/her America.
JM: I find that very easy to imagine, as long as they/them isn’t seen as something that makes you look down on him/her. And I don’t necessarily think that there would be people out in the him/her America saying, “Oh, you mean these people who say they/them?” And it would be seen as kind of a strange affectation, but I don’t know if they would feel put down about it. There are class differences. There are regional differences there, political differences. I don’t think we’re ever going to get past that. The question is just how we feel about the differences.
On the Trump administration’s policing of language:
BW: Donald Trump campaigned on the idea that wrongspeak was over. He said, “I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.” And then he started scrubbing words like equity and nonbinary and anti-racist from federal websites, some of which I cheer. One thing I do not cheer for is that Jackie Robinson’s page was scrubbed from the Air Force website because it described his anti-segregation protests. And then, of course, there’s the Gulf of Mexico becoming the Gulf of America, which I have to say, I think is very funny. Or renaming Denali in Alaska back to Mount McKinley. How do you think about all of this? Is this unique, or has it always been this way?
JM: No, it has not always been this way. And basically, this starts with a certain group of people on the hard left who are teaching us a religious tenet, which is that battling the power of whiteness must center all endeavor. That’s clearly insane, and there’s been a useful backlash against that. The backlash, however, is excessive when it becomes that we’re going to allow free speech except when it comes to all of these words that can be connected to battling power differentials. And we’re going to go after every single word and every single concept. To be so obsessed with that is crazy as well.
On the “woke right”:
BW: One of the things that I’ve been wanting to ask you about is this thing that is being described as the “woke right.” So if we had the woke left, which you write about so powerfully in your book, Woke Racism. Now we have an illiberal right that is adopting a lot of the same tools as the woke left. Do you believe there is such a thing as the woke right?
JM: The right is certainly not woke to the same things that the woke left has been. And what we mean by “woke right” is that this right is as recreationally punitive and prosecutorial as the woke left was.
BW: The place where we began this conversation: The cover of your new book is purple. I think of you as a purple person, and that you are not easily categorized as red or blue. You’re politically independent, which means I think that puts you in a really important position as a cultural observer and commentator. As someone really angry and concerned about the direction we were heading in culturally, as a result of illiberalism from the left, how worried are you about the illiberalism from the right and the direction of our culture right now?
JM: I worry about illiberalism from the left because it continues, especially in academia and the arts. Academia and the arts is only one part of this great, wonderful world, but nevertheless, it is strangling creativity and sometimes even intelligence in too many fields. And so the Great Awokening is over. Wokeness from the left doesn’t have the power that it had five years ago, but it does hold on there. And I think, if I may, we certainly see its operations in how people often process the Gaza war.
BW: You want to say two more sentences about that, just so people know what you mean?
JM: And of course, it’s one thing to say that the Great Awokening is over, but then to see what’s going on on our campuses, for example, and the utter intolerance of alternate views from people who are against Israel’s actions in Gaza and are also against Israel’s existence. The intransigence, the impossibility of conversation of any kind, that’s very 2020. To say woke is gone sometimes feels like what we really mean is just that it’s retracted a little bit and changed its locations.
From the right, it’s frightening because we have an administration in power run by someone who has no business in the office, and has hired a clown car of a cabinet to help him not run the country. And so there’s actual power there. Their actual funding policies—there are actual people being disappeared practically based on this kind of thought, which is not something that I had expected before. Some of these things many people would say are more concrete dangers than anything going on in the arts or somebody’s protesting the war in Gaza.
The illiberalism from both sides is very frightening to me. I wouldn’t write about it only from the left now. Now that would be shrill.
What you’re seeing is too many Americans who are incapable of talking to one another, incapable of seeing the other side. It’s a problem when people can’t have a coherent conversation. And that’s what we’re seeing.
