HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania (LifeSiteNews) — Pennsylvania Democrat Gov. Josh Shapiro is moving to update the state’s health code by replacing terms denoting females with gender-neutral language, underscoring the woke reality beneath the moderate image sometimes attributed to the governor.
The Daily Wire reports that the governor’s proposed updates, which span more than 500 pages, replace instances of “woman” with “individual” and refer to new mothers as “postpartum individuals,” ostensibly to leave room to recognize the ultimately-fictional concept of “pregnant men” – as explained by a notorious 2021 opinion from the left-wing American College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians that “Some postpartum [so-called] transgender individuals may not identify as ‘mothers;’ thus, obstetrician–gynecologists and other health care professionals should be mindful of the language they use.”
“Somehow, in the midst of hundreds of pages of new government mandates, the department also found it necessary to erase words like ‘pregnant woman’ and ‘mother’ in the regulations and replace them with terms like ‘pregnant individual,’” responded Republican state Sen. Michele Brooks.
“The changing of language in the regulations represents the triumph of ideology over biology,” said Independence Law Center chief counsel Randall Wenger. “This change of language doesn’t reflect reality; it obscures it. It erases female identity as a stable category in favor of a fluid concept of gender. The Shapiro administration is so concerned with affirming transgender identity that it can no longer recognize the realities of biological sex. The department cannot pretend to fight dangerous diseases with its delusions about gender.”
It is a dictate of leftism that gender is no more than a matter of self-perception which individuals are free to change at will, with no correlation to biological sex, which in reality is rooted in an individual’s chromosomes and reflected by hundreds of genetic characteristics.
Only females are physically capable of bearing children, though pro-LGBT activists who assert otherwise would like to reorient society’s understanding of gender to refer exclusively to perception. To that end, the media frequently promotes stories about “pregnant transgender men” (who are actually women suffering from gender dysphoria) and research about transplanting wombs into men who “identify” as women.
Absent such semantic maneuvers or artificial machinations, however, all “birthing persons” or “birthing parents” are in fact mothers, and the insistence that society act otherwise has been linked to an array of medical and social ills.
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
In 2024, National Health Service (NHS) England’s landmark Cass Review found that “gender medicine” is “built on shaky foundations” and that “[w]hile a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.”
In April, a study of “all under-23-year-old gender-referred individuals between 1996 and 2019” in Finland (2,083 people) found that those who had gone through “gender transitions” had “markedly higher psychiatric morbidity [other mental health issues] than controls before and after referral, with treatment needs often persisting and even intensifying after medical interventions.”
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who suffered under transitioning before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
Yet none of that appears to matter to Shapiro, who is sometimes floated as a presidential contender on the assumption he could pass as a more mainstream candidate than the most prominent Democrats, who are perceived as fixated on far-left agenda items at the expense of voters’ kitchen-table concerns.
In reality, Shapiro has always pushed the transgender agenda as governor. In 2023, his administration changed the state’s definition of “sex” to include “gender identity and expression,” opening the door to innumerable intrusions and accommodations in health, education, athletics, prisons, and more.
The Daily Wire notes that year Shapiro also established a “Governor’s Advisory Commission on LGBTQ Affairs” to promote the transgender agenda and more and that he has joined a lawsuit against the Trump administration to continue harmful “gender transition” surgeries on confused minors.