You should try to be objective here. Regardless of the alleged infusion of Chaosium's product with "wokeness", everyone can see that the main trend in the material is very positive. Others have pointed that out above. The books are of higher quality than ever, with better art, expanded and interesting writing, and slowly improving composition. (If only they got rid of all those annoying typos...) This is probably the most important factor in determining whether you should buy their books. If I was only reading books, listening to music, etc., of creators that agree with me politically, I would never open a book by Dostoyevski or listen to the Queen.
I am against "wokeism" myself and disagree with the people above, who try to pretend that to be woke means to be "aware of social problems." Being a member of a certain "important" minority and a foreigner living in the USA, in my personal experience, I have never met more biased, hurtful, and ignorant people than those who called themselves "woke." Maybe I shouldn't generalize, but I try to avoid engaging with them whenever I can. As you can already see from the responses of fellow posters, they are quick to judge and condemn without giving them the benefit of doubt (not to say respect or kindness.) They do not want to hear you, just call for the closure of the topic. Believe me, most people are not like that, and there is a silent majority of people who share your concerns.
However, I do not think, as you suggested in the title, that "Chaosium is fully woke." As others said, the pronoun "they" has its history in English literature. In principle, there is nothing wrong with using it to refer to a single person. Furthermore, there is nothing "woke" about gender/race-swapping of NPCs (you probably mean Masks of Nyarlathotep here). It often makes the story more interesting and rich and can be defended just on this single basis. (Personally, I would say that only the introduction of Wycroft's daughters in the Australian chapter instead of Aboriginal workers felt completely unnecessary and based solely on the "natives can not be evil" attitude. But I am probably wrong here.) As a game master, I enjoy roleplaying NPCs that are not all white American men, and come from different backgrounds, even if it might be historically inaccurate.
Here I have to agree with you. Changing "Sex/Gender" to "Pronouns" on character sheets does not make any sense from the gaming perspective on several different levels. For instance, when I make a character, what matters is their identity, not how people refer to them. I want to know if my PC is a woman or a trans-woman, not what is their "pronoun." Anyone can have any pronoun, and it does not contain any relevant information about the character. When, in 20 years I will look at my old character sheets, seeing "her," I will not remember whether I played a woman, trans-woman, non-binary person, drag queen, a man dressed as a woman to hide his identity or anyone else that happened to like this pronoun. This is just one of many problems. I agree that this change is illogical and clearly a thoughtless try to follow some of the weirdest fashions of the western world. If you travel outside of the US, Canada, or England, not only the majority of the population of the world will tell you that it is absurd, but even the majority of native liberals/ progressives.
I still tough think that this is a minor issue. The more worrying and subtle problem is when Chaosium, in their products, takes stance on certain subjects fully in line with some chewed version of Foucalt's or Derrida's postmodernism from American universities. They often assume the stunted "power dynamics" narrative or false "oppressor-victim" dichotomy; see, for example, some sections of MoN, Terror Australis, or Children of Fear. Their claims about diversity and inclusion of various perspectives in their setting books are inconsistent and leave out a huge chunk of the indigenous populations. For example, there is usually no coverage of religious traditions in their sourcebooks, despite most of the societies and their cultures in the 1920s being deeply rooted in a religious belief. For purely gaming purposes, I needed to know what kind of protestants were there in Berlin and what was specific about them (same for German Jews) and could not find any useful information in the book. I had the same problem with the Australia book. Nothing in MoN. Nothing in the 7ed Rulebook or Investigator's Handbook. So I, as a game-master, have no clue what church-going looked like in the 1920s, and can not really accommodate my players who decided to have highly conservative, Anglo-Saxon characters because writers have a huge blind spot for a particular part of human culture. In Harlem Unbound, which actually describes the Jewish community in a very helpful (game-wise) manner, the author, on the other hand, deals with racial subjects in a rather extreme way. He adds unnecessary controversial statements that shocked my black friends at the gaming store, and who deemed them completely nonsensical. At first, as a foreigner, I thought that there was something wrong with me, but they explained that no one reasonable believes in some of these weird ideas.
I think this is an equally nonsensical statement. I truly believe that Chaosium has good intentions and cares about making every gamer welcome. They probably just try to follow a particular "trendy" (and loud) flavor of social theories that actually have very little to do with the reality of minorities or people that historically were discriminated against. Despite that, I think that they are still very balanced and cautious not to disrespect anyone, which is the most important thing. I guess, with the political polarization in the US, especially on the internet, they might feel like dancing on the edge of a razor blade. The fact that they publish something that you disagree with is not even close to real discrimination.
