Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed an executive order on Thursday prohibiting “woke, anti-women words” in state documents.
“It’s the left that decided that ‘woman’ is a dirty word,” Sanders said at the signing. “It’s the left that decided we needed basic biology and basic grammar along with it.”
“Women are women,” the executive order states. “Government should reject language that ignores, undermines, and erases women. Government should celebrate gender distinctions between men and women — not erase them.”
The executive order prohibits all state offices, departments, boards, and commissions from using the words and terms Governor Sanders described as “ridiculous.” Effective immediately, “exclusionary and sexist terms” are to be replaced with “accurate, female-affirming alternatives.”
The newly banned terminology includes “menstruating person,” “menstruating people,” “birth-giver,” “womxn,” “womyn,” “laboring person,” “birthing person,” “human milk,” “chestfeeding,” “body fed,” and “person fed.”
Instead, the state must use alternatives such as “woman,” “women,” “birth mom,” “breast milk,” “breastfeeding,” “breast fed,” “pregnant women,” “pregnant mom,” or “birth mom.”
“Today, we’re taking a stand against woke nonsense,” Sanders said at the signing. “What frankly started as a fad among a few grad students has seeped down into corporations, the health-care industry, and increasingly, state government.”
At the signing, Governor Sanders was surrounded by Arkansan women whom she described as “influential and amazing.”
“We are all here to say, frankly, that we’ve had enough,” Sanders said, noting that she was the first woman and mother to serve as the governor of Arkansas. “Enough trying to erase women and girls, enough denying our biological differences from men, and enough of the craziness that is taking over our country.”
Doctor Kay Chandler, an OB-GYN who was appointed as the Arkansas Surgeon General by Governor Sanders in 2023, offered brief remarks at the signing.
“As I was taught in medical school — and actually, have known since I was five years old when I happened to be looking through my mother’s nursing school textbooks and ran into some embryology textbooks — women give birth,” Chandler said. “Today, that is somehow become controversial, but it shouldn’t be.”
When asked how about the number of specific instances the newly banned terms appear in Arkansas documents, Sanders responded, “I’m not keeping a running tally.”
“I have seen one specific instance and we’ve had a number of other instances that have been reported to our office,” Sanders continued.
A spokesperson for Sanders, Alexa Henning, shared with Axios an example of “pregnant person” in a Department of Health newsletter but did not confirm if there were any complaints.
The Biden administration’s 2022 fiscal year budget used the phrase “birthing people.” The Biden administration’s “Blueprint for Addressing the Maternal Health Crisis,” released in June 2022, used the phrase “pregnant people” in addition to sex-specific terms like “women” and “mother.”