Anderson Cooper embarrassed after Dem activist corrects CNN anchor on pronouns at Bernie Sanders town hall: ‘It’s they/them’

Anderson Cooper committed a woke faux pas after he misgendered a Democratic activist while hosting a Bernie Sanders town hall event on Wednesday.

The CNN host was introducing activist Grace Thomas as they prepared to ask the Vermont senator a question when the mishap occurred.

“She’s a local civil rights attorney, she’s a Democrat, Grace?” he said as he spoke on CNN, before he was shot down by Thomas.

“It’s they/them pronouns, actually,” Thomas corrected him, to which Cooper quickly responded, “Oh.”

Thomas went on to ask their question about why the Democratic Party is hemorrhaging young male voters.

Many commenters online felt that Thomas’ question answered itself, in the wake of a clip of the incident going viral on X.

“The best part is that right after scolding Anderson Cooper for not calling her ‘they,’ she asks a question about why Democrats are losing men,” one X user joked.

“Anderson Cooper just misgendered a civil rights attorney,” another X user wrote in a post. “They are not serious. Keep on putting the pronoun police on camera, we will win every election.”

Some Republicans even felt sorry for the news anchor in the wake of the fallout.

“I’m going to defend Anderson Cooper here,” a third X user wrote. “That’s something I don’t often do. But it was entirely reasonable for him to assume that this woman would naturally use female pronouns.”

He added: “Her rebuke of him was a snarky, gotcha mome. Who else found that highly irritating?”

Gender gap

The huge swing of young male voters across race and class boundaries toward President Trump was one of the most startling trends from November’s presidential election.

The Republicans secured an astonishing 57% of men under 30, a 24-point margin over Kamala Harris and the Democrats, according to estimates from AP VoteCast surveys.

That represented a major turnaround from 2020, when Joe Biden secured 56% of young male voters to 41% for President Trump.

Young white and Latino men shifted dramatically to President Trump in the 2024 election, by 22 points and 38 points respectively.

The share of young men who identify as Republicans has also grown steadily in the past decade, according to Gallup polling data.

In 2016, the year President Trump first took the White House, more than half (51%) of young men identified as Democrat or leaned toward the Democratic Party.

But by 2023, that figure had fallen to 38%, with more young men identifying as Republican than Democrat for the first time since 2003.

Out of touch

The Democrats’ perceived extreme stance on trans issues was used by President Trump as a stick with which to beat the Democrats throughout last year’s bruising election campaign.

One of his famous campaign slogans was, “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

Even some Democrats have acknowledged that the party leadership’s support for trans women in female sports and hormone treatment for children who say they are trans has alienated many voters.

California Governor Gavin Newsom — who is widely expected to run for president in 2028 — admitted that it is unfair for many trans women to compete against biological females in sports.