New York State just scrubbed "mother" and "father" from its statutes and replaced them with "gestating parent" and "non-gestating parent" — and if you think that's insane, the establishment press says the problem is you for noticing.
President Trump blasted the language overhaul at a Friday rally in Syracuse, singling out "radical left lunatic" Gov. Kathy Hochul and state legislators for a bill that rewrites surrogacy laws to erase biological parentage in favor of clinically sterile gender-neutral jargon. "You can no longer say 'mother, hi mom!' it's 'hi gestating,'" Trump mocked. "'Hi gestating, I love you so much gestating.'"
The crowd of several thousand laughed, but the stakes aren't funny. This is the legislative annihilation of biological reality — a state government declaring that the relationship between a mother and child is a technicality to be rebranded. The bill also renames "paternity" hearings as "parentage" hearings, stripping the specific recognition of fatherhood from statute.
Republican gubernatorial nominee Bruce Blakeman, who joined Trump onstage, called it exactly what it is: "They want to take control away from parents. They're denigrating moms and dads. They're letting Albany make the decisions that should be up to parents."
Hochul's spokesperson responded with a remarkable two-step: "Hochul believes mothers are mothers and fathers are fathers, and no legislation changes that." Then, in the same statement: "The legislation, which we will review, appears to address technical legal issues related to surrogacy and parentage. Anyone making bad-faith arguments is deliberately misleading New Yorkers for political gain."
So mothers are mothers — except in the law, where they're gestating parents, and if you object you're acting in bad faith. That's the Albany line.
The coverage tells you everything about who's invested in burying this. The New York Post made the language fight its lead. Fox News, by contrast, buried it — its rally story focused on the "Golden Age" economic pitch and the Micron semiconductor plant, giving the gender-ideology fight zero air. The Guardian didn't mention it at all, devoting its entire dispatch to Trump's Nobel Peace Prize complaints and his threats toward Iran. When the press agrees to change the subject, pay attention to what they're changing it from.
Blakeman trails Hochul by 11 points in the latest Marist poll, though a Siena survey had him within single digits. Either way, Albany just handed every parent in New York a reason to ask what else their government plans to rename out of existence.
The question isn't whether Trump was rude to say "gestating parent" out loud. The question is why any legislature would write it into law in the first place.
