Sarah Huckabee Sanders Bans Use of Gender Neutral Terms in Arkansas Official Documents

Ms. Sanders is pursuing the elimination of ‘woke’ language from government documents.

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas attends the AutoZone Liberty Bowl game between the Kansas Jayhawks and the Arkansas Razorbacks at Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium in Memphis, Tenn., on Dec. 28, 2022 . Justin Ford/Getty Images

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has announced a ban on the use of “gender neutral” terms in official state documents.

In an executive order on Thursday, Ms. Sanders banned non-gender-specific terms such as “menstruating person” or “menstruating people,” which describes a person who does not identify themselves as a woman but goes through the monthly period cycle common to women.

These terms, along with other gender-neutral words such as “birth giver,” “womxn,” or “womyn” must be replaced with “woman” or “women,” according to Ms. Sanders.

The executive order also restricts the use of phrases such as “human milk,” “chestfeeding,” and “birthing people,” in favor of those that ascribe specific gender-based attributes.

Ms. Sanders labeled such terms “exclusionary and sexist” and advocated for their replacement with “accurate, female-affirming alternatives.”

“There are things only women can do, like perform the miracle of birth,“ Ms. Sanders wrote in the executive order. ”Government should reject language that ignores, undermines, and erases women; Government should celebrate gender distinctions between men and women — not erase them.”

Sanders’s War on Woke

At the beginning of this year, Ms. Sanders issued a comparable directive prohibiting the use of the term “Latinx”—a gender-neutral expression that describes Hispanic or Latino communities—in state documents.

“One can no more easily remove gender from Spanish and other romance languages than one can remove vowels and verbs from English; and it is the policy of the Governor’s administration to prohibit the use of culturally insensitive words for official state government business,” Ms. Sanders said in the executive order in January.

In her historic role as the first and youngest female Arkansas governor, Ms. Sanders has stood against so-called “woke” culture.

In her address to the nation earlier this year, she denounced President Joe Biden as “the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can’t tell you what a woman is,” and that his administration “seems more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day.”

In a separate speech, Ms. Sanders cited the births of her three children as instrumental in solidifying her stance on the issue. She said: “That experience underscored to me that a woman’s perspective is important and fundamentally different from a man’s. Nowadays though, only conservatives seem to be making that point. On the left, women have taken a backseat to political correctness.”

Gender Issues in the US

Ms. Sanders’s executive order arrives during a moment when gender issues are taking center stage in public discussions in a number of states.

A language guide issued by Michigan State University recommended that students refrain from using the term “female” as a noun when referring to women, as it is believed that “this pejorative term reduces women to their assumed biological anatomy.”

The guide also instructs students to replace the term “women’s/men’s restroom” with “restroom” or “all-gender,” ”family,” or ”single-occupant restroom.”

Stanford University also drew flak in 2022 for releasing a “harmful language” guide, in which it advises against the use of some gendered terms such as “chairwoman,” “policewoman,” and “landlady.”