Can only women breastfeed? It depends which state legislator you ask. The Michigan state senate, following a vote last week, is replacing the terms “woman” and “she” with “individual.” The idea is to expand the scope of its Breastfeeding Anti-Discrimination Act.

In Arkansas, though, Governor Sanders is eliminating from state government what she calls “woke, anti-woman words” which purportedly threaten to “erase” the biological distinctions between men and women.

These opposing policies are part of a heated debate over the definition of womanhood that has erupted in states across the country. Kansas and Montana have adopted a Women’s Bill of Rights which defines “sex” as biological sex at birth. A similar measure failed in Oklahoma’s legislature, but the governor there imposed similar policies across state government via executive order.

Meanwhile, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin have passed legislation to include gender-neutral language in their constitutions. “The difference is no longer between right and left — it’s between normal and crazy,” Ms. Sanders writes on X.

Bans on female-centric language treat “woman” as “a dirty word,” Governor Sanders suggests in another post. “The left,” she says, is “trying to erase women and girls in the name of political correctness. We won’t let that happen in Arkansas.”

Ms. Sanders’s executive order signed Thursday bans the language often used by trans activists to obscure gender from descriptions of childbearing. It requires Arkansas legislators to use “breastfeeding” instead of “chestfeeding,” “breast fed” instead of “body fed,” and “woman” instead of “birth giver.”

While Ms. Sanders likens Michigan’s new policy to “the cultural revolution,” its sponsor in the upper house in the Wolverine State, Senator Irwin, said on the floor in Lansing that “this legislation is about supporting moms and babies, not about some twisted culture war.” 

The original bill was passed in 2014 with bipartisan support to protect mothers who nurse their infants in public from discrimination and prosecution. A proposal by a Republican senator, Michele Hoitenga, to reinsert “woman” and “she” into the updated bill was defeated. 

Fans of the new legislation argue that the change reflects an “evolving” society. “It isn’t just people who are assigned female at birth who are having children,” an advocate for gender equity in the workplace at the public policy group, New America, Vicki Shabo, tells the Sun. “But it might be people who identify as non-binary or people who are assigned male at birth but are transgender women.”

Ms. Shabo says Arkansas’s bans on gender-neutral language is “a symptom of a really disturbing culture war, where gender is getting polarized into broader partisan and ideological warfare.” She suggests that parenthood should be independent of politics.

“I think people just want to go about their lives and don’t really want to get into other people’s business,” she says. “People believe in love, and they believe in live and let live.”

The American electorate might not generally be in favor of bills like the one that just passed in Michigan, though. “The organizations that are very close to legislators are yelling at them with very loud megaphones and tempting them to think that everyone feels this way,” the executive director at the Women’s Liberation Front, Sharon Byrne, tells the Sun. “But when we actually talk to the constituents directly, we find out, it’s not necessarily so.”

“All the gender ideology bills always require that women give up their rights and do not ask women for their consent first,” says Ms. Byrne, whose nonprofit group is dedicated to “the total liberation of women and girls” against the “patriarchy.” She highlights a double standard: “You don’t see men being asked to give up their rights to their language.”

The push for gender-neutral ideology in defense of transgenderism is “the first movement we’ve ever seen in human rights history that takes rights away from one historically marginalized group,” says Ms. Byrne, “and hands them to some newly declared one.” 

As one famous advocate for biological sex, J.K. Rowling, the British author, puts it, “if sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.” In those comments from 2020 that generated global controversy, she claims that “it isn’t hate to speak the truth.”