Wisconsin moves to erase ‘mother’ and ‘father’

Lawmakers in the Wisconsin Senate’s Joint Finance Committee introduced legislation last week that replaces “mother” and “father” with gender-neutral terms.

The 1,917-page bill has crossed out most mentions of “mother” and “father” and replaced them with words like “parent.” In some cases, “mother” was replaced with “parent who gave birth to the child” or “inseminated person.” Mentions of “male” have been replaced with “person” and “husband” with “spouse.”

The legislation runs counter to President Donald Trump’s executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which he signed on his first day in office. The order slams “ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex” and “[t]he erasure of sex in language and policy,” which “has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.”

“Invalidating the true and biological category of ‘woman’ improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept,” the EO continued before defining gendered terms like “woman” and “man.”

‘Offensive to mothers’

Although Wisconsin’s bill may not violate Trump’s executive order, it triggered public outrage against Governor Tony Evers, who supports it.

“Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’ latest left-wing push isn’t just out of touch, it’s offensive to mothers,” said Republican Governors Association Executive Director Sara Craig. “Being a mother is the greatest privilege I will have in my lifetime, and every mother I know feels the same. If Tony Evers can reduce motherhood to an ‘inseminated person’ then our society is lost.”

“Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers is trying to change state law to replace the term ‘mother’ with ‘inseminated person.’ He is attempting to sneak it into a thousand-page budget bill. This isn’t just crazy—it’s an insult to women who give birth and raise children,” Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI) wrote on X.