MADISON, WI (WSAU) – Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers’s office introduced a bill on Friday afternoon that would change the way a Wisconsin state law addresses biological women and men.
According to the bill known as 2025 Senate Bill 45, which was first reported on by conservative radio host Dan O’Donnell, Section 3106 contains numerous examples of terms such as wife, husband, mother, and father being crossed out and removed in favor of terms like spouse, person, and even inseminated person.
Senate Bill 45 Section 3106
This bill’s original purpose pertained to “state finances and appropriations, constituting the executive budget act of the 2025 legislature,” and the request for the language changes to be made wasn’t introduced until pages 1,766 and 1,767.
Online, the proposed change received a lot of attention. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and the head of DOGE, described Evers’ decision as “messed up” in a remark on X. In another post on X, former U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde called the measure “so stupid it hurts.” Riley Gaines, a former Kentucky All-American swimmer and women’s rights activist, responded on X, saying, “I can’t explain how ridiculously offensive it is for women to be reduced down to whether they’ve been inseminated or not.” Former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker weighed in as well, saying, “Women are women. Pregnant women are mothers,” and in another post, stated that “2026 can’t come soon enough.”
The movement in mainly Democratic-controlled states to change or remove these terms from state law is not new, as the state of Massachusetts introduced and made into law “The Massachusetts Parentage Act” last August, which ensures “legal parentage equality” for children born to parents “without regard to the marital status, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation of their parents or the circumstances of their birth, including whether they were born as a result of assisted reproduction or surrogacy.”
Additionally, the Massachusetts bill mandated that state parentage laws exclude terms like “father” and “mother” and substitute them with more “inclusive” ones like “parent” or “the person who gave birth.”
Other states that passed similar legislation in recent years include Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
This bill comes as the Trump administration has signed an executive order that bans biological men from competing against biological women in high school and college sports. Both the WIAA and NCAA have announced in recent weeks that they will comply with the president’s order.
Republican state lawmakers such as Assembly Speaker Robin Vos are yet to officially comment on the bill, and Gov. Tony Evers has not released a formal statement on the proposed legislation at this time.
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