Actor James Woods posts transphobic tweet and the Dictionary schools him on that

Hollywood actor, Trump supporter and serial tweeter of bad takes James Woods is known for spouting some pretty awful stuff online – especially jibes aimed at the LGBT+ community.

In September 2017, the 71-year-old had lashed out at a fictional book for including two gay characters. Now, he’s trying to get his head around pronouns.

According to Woods, a person cannot use the pronoun ‘they’ as it is plural. In his divine wisdom, the only acceptable pronouns are ‘he’ or ‘she’. He blames the increased use of ‘they’ on “hare-brained liberals”.

Many Twitter users were quick to pile on Woods for this completely misguided and ignorant tweet. One commented: “Language changes constantly.” Another user said: “Wild how transphobia turns everyone into a grammar pedant.”

However, the ultimate dunk on Woods’ logic came from Dictionary.com.

Known for taking apart people like Donald Trump and Kylie Jenner, the dictionary tore Woods to shreds by telling him that ‘they’ has been used as a pronoun since the 1300s and has been used by the literary greats like William Shakespeare and Jane Austen.

As you can imagine, people were very happy to see this expert takedown of a bigoted comment.

In Old English, usage of ‘they’ dipped in 1745. This followed hundreds of years of its usage in the singular. Calls for a gender-neutral pronoun began again in 1794 after a series of ‘battle of the sexes’ articles appeared. There is also evidence of ‘thon’ (contract of that one) being proposed as a gender-neutral pronoun.