A new bill in the state of New York will remove the terms “mother” and “father” from state child custody and parental laws. “Mother” will be replaced with “gestating parent”, while “father” will become “non-gestating parent” or “parent” in family court, domestic law and education law under legislation passed last week by state Democrats. “Paternity” proceedings to determine a child’s biological father will become “parentage” cases under the bill, which passed the Assembly in March and the Senate last week.
A “putative father” will now be called “an alleged parent” in official state records. The bill was sponsored by Senator Luis Sepulveda, a Bronx Democrat, and Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, a Westchester Democrat. It will now proceed to Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk for approval.
The change has caused outrage. Conservative Party Chairman Gerard Kassar said: “It’s woke culture run amok. It’s one-upmanship.” Kassar also condemned it as a waste of time, saying: “It’s an example of how out of tune the New York legislature is. It’s an unnecessary and wasteful use of time.”
Not Just a US Problem
This change of language from male and female terms to gender-neutral language is not confined to New York politics. Like most bad ideas that come from the left in the United States, it has found a way into Europe. In 2021, Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals Trust in the UK added gender-neutral language to its maternity services, including the terms “chest feeding” and “birthing partner” in order to be more trans-friendly. A document on the trust’s website at the time listed new terms such as “breast/chestfeeding”, “mothers and birthing parents” and “father or second biological parent” as the way patients should be addressed in its services.
In 2023, the General Medical Council (GMC), also in Britain, removed all mention of “mothers” from a maternity document for its staff. Updated internal guidance for GMC employees who become pregnant replaced female-specific language with gender-neutral terms throughout, using phrases such as “surrogate parent” instead of “surrogate mother”. Its internal menopause policy document was also updated and removed all references to “women”.
Eliminating Visibility in Language
In 2024, the Irish government put forward a referendum that sought to remove the words “mother” and “woman” from the Irish constitution and replace them with gender-neutral language. This was firmly rejected by voters. It has been at least 10 years since schools in France replaced the words “mother” and “father” with “Parent 1” and “Parent 2” on official French school documents. The erasure of mother and father was justified as a way to “reduce discrimination faced by same-sex parents”.
Indeed, the French language itself, which has masculine and feminine forms, is now threatened with gender-neutral alternatives. France’s Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, recently upheld the use of inclusive writing, or écriture inclusive, on commemorative plaques at Paris City Hall. This was condemned as “gibberish” by Régis Ravat, president of Francophonie Avenir, which campaigns to defend the French language.
Ravat would surely be at a loss over the recent announcement that a British exam board will permit GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) French students to use gender-neutral language, despite the terms not being used in France. Under so-called inclusive language, adopted by some left-wing councils and universities, the French pronouns for “he” and “she”, normally il and elle, are replaced by the newly coined hybrid word iel, with iels as a new neutral plural. Former French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer called the proposals absurd, saying: “French grammar has not changed in this regard. And the use of ‘iel’ does not correspond to any widespread usage among the French population.”
The change to gender-neutral terms in official documents or government records is not simply a case of updating language to reflect modern usage. Sometimes it is necessary for official language to reflect common usage, or the way language is used by the general public in everyday life. For instance, even conservatives use the term “partner” instead of husband or wife, and few continue to use the term “Christian name”.
Pressure From Well-Funded Lobby Groups
The introduction of gender-neutral terms, which are always justified in the name of inclusion and anti-discrimination, is the opposite of reflecting common usage. The changes are imposed upon a population that would not use or recognize them if it were not for powerful and well-funded lobby groups seeking official change and then policing the language once the change is made. It is a change imposed by a minority upon the majority without their consent. In this way, it is a top-down revolution that aims to transform how people speak and therefore how they think, and ultimately how society is organized.
In the case of the New York bill, the memo accompanying the legislation claims the change is necessary because it brings state law into line with generally accepted standards for how family courts handle surrogacy cases and cases involving same-sex parents, including couples with two mothers.
This demonstrates that radical ideas such as surrogacy, gay marriage and transgenderism are behind the language change. The transformation in the language and the removal of the word “mother” are necessary to accommodate surrogacy, which involves the literal removal of the birth mother from her infant.
The idea that we need to be more inclusive and accommodating of minorities is a subtle way of enforcing speech codes and forcing people to accept ideas that, on careful examination and reflection, they would not necessarily accept. So-called gender-neutral language, inclusive language and the policing of pronouns are dangerous forms of compelled speech. Speech is how we express ideas. Authorities that compel speech therefore compel how we should think.
Erasing Biological Reality
The concept behind the New York bill, the NHS trust’s use of the word “chestfeeding” and the GMC’s removal of the word “woman” is that there is nothing unique about womanhood or motherhood. The families of mothers who died in childbirth in other NHS hospitals might think otherwise, but that means little to the GMC. The idea this language change compels you to adopt and accommodate is that there are many genders and that men and women are interchangeable. This is a radical shift because gender itself is a very new and debatable term.
The language shift seeks not inclusion but erasure. It is the erasure of the biological reality that there is male and female. It is the erasure of the biological reality that only women can become pregnant, carry a pregnancy to term, go through labor, which can be high-risk, and deliver a child. It is only a woman, now a mother, who can breastfeed her infant child. In forcing us to ignore the reality that there is only male and female, mother and father, and masculine and feminine, those who impose these changes are seeking to remake how we see society itself. The changes are designed to pressure people into accepting ideas that are not only objectively wrong but confusing.
The basis of society is the biological reality of male and female and the way they complement each other. Indeed, the reality of male and female is so perfect and complementary that when the two come together, they can produce new life. We should always be on guard when someone tries to dictate to us how we should speak and therefore how we should think. Only a mother should have that kind of privilege over her children.