Wisconsin governor comes under heavy criticism for replacing the word 'mother' with 'inseminated person' in tax plan

The governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers, is facing an avalanche of criticism for proposing in his 2025-27 fiscal plan to replace traditional words like "mother" with gender-neutral terms like "inseminated person," in a stance that is not unfamiliar to the Democratic leader, who in the past has already sought to impose this sort of 'neo-language' in his previous biennial budget proposals for his state.

Evers, who touted his fiscal proposal for the next two years as the most "pro-kids budget in history," framed the section of the bill that addresses a child's parenting challenges with a series of controversial changes to terms used in the state code.

For example, it proposed replacing "paternity" with "parentage," "wife" or "husband" with "spouse," and the word "parent" was changed more than 100 times in the text to "natural parent."

Likewise, the word "mother"was also changed to "parent who gave birth to the child."

The tax proposal, which is nearly 2,000 pages long, drew harsh criticism against Evers, who was accused by state Republicans of wanting to eliminate women, marriage and the most basic concepts of family.

Wisconsin Senate President Mary Felzkowski said: "It is disgusting to see the Evers administration’s attempt to erase mothers and fathers." 

"It is becoming clear the governor not only wants the government to raise children, as we learned in the State of the State address, but that he wants to erase the concept of ’mom and dad’ altogether."

The Republican Governors Association (RGA) also issued its own statement in response to Evers' language changes, which in 2023 had already proposed eliminating biological terms in his tax proposal, Wisconsin Watch reported.

Evers' "latest left-wing push" is "offensive to mothers," said RGA 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 Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany also questioned the Democratic governor for trying to sneak these changes into a thousands-of-pages tax proposal seeking to make them go unnoticed.

"Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers is trying to change state law to replace the term 'mother’ with 'inseminated person,’" the representative told X. "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."

Evers' tax proposal also comes at a time when the federal government, led by President Donald Trump, is removing gender ideology-friendly language pushed by the Biden administration, acknowledging only the existence of two biological sexes: male and female.