“By creating the human being man and woman, God gives personal dignity equally to the one and the other. Each of them, man and woman, should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity.”
― Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2393
On the last working day of its session this month, the New York State Legislature sent [1] Governor Kathy Hochul a bill that would strike the words “mother” and “father” from large parts of state law. In their place the law would read “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent.” The word “paternity” would become “parentage.”
In other words, a child, in the eyes of New York, would no longer have a mother and a father, but two adults sorted by which one happened to carry him.
The bill is A8382A/S9316 [4], sponsored by Assemblymember Amy Paulin and State Senator Luis Sepúlveda. It rewrites the language of the Family Court Act, the Domestic Relations Law, and the statutes that govern child support, social services, education, and more.
If Governor Hochul signs it, the change takes effect November 1, touching the roughly 150,000 custody and parentage cases New Yorkers file every year.
This Bill was Passed with Virtually No Debate
To hear the bill’s sponsors discuss it, nothing of any importance has happened.
Assemblymember Paulin says the measure simply answers a request “to modernize the law to respect all families in whatever form they take.” Supporters call it a terminology update, a housekeeping fix meant to smooth the statutes for same-sex couples, adoptive parents, and those who obtain children through surrogacy, which New York legalized in 2021.
The underlying legal standards, they are quick to add, do not change. “Only” the words do.
The Assembly passed the bill back in March, 91 to 46. The Senate took it up on June 2 and passed it with no debate at all, a maneuver that, according to Fox 5 New York, shocked some lawmakers as the session rushed to a close. Every voting Senate Democrat but one supported it. Every Republican opposed it.
A bill that deletes the two most universal words in any human language, mother and father, from the law of the nation’s fourth-largest state was pushed through with no meaningful debate.
Governor Hochul now has thirty days to act. If she signs, “gestating parent” becomes New York law. If she does nothing, the bill is pocket-vetoed and quietly dies. So far she has said only that she was “unfamiliar with the specifics” and would review them.
New York’s Bishops Urge Governor Hochul to Veto the Bill
New York’s bishops certainly were not convinced that the bill was a housekeeping effort that “only” has to do with words.
In a statement [4] issued June 10 through the New York State Catholic Conference, they blasted the bill as “politically charged” and “unnecessary,” and urged the governor to veto it.
“The truth is that mothers are mothers, and fathers are fathers,” they wrote. “Words matter, and serious changes to our governing language serve only to wash away the importance of these roles in our society.”
The bishops placed the bill within the larger context of the State’s rapid move towards extreme progressivism, writing:
The yearslong push in our state for abortion on demand and up until birth, the endless millions of dollars funneled to Planned Parenthood, and the legalization of commercial surrogacy have reduced women to vessels and babies to disposable commodities. The Legislature’s final twist of the knife is now apparently removing the term “mother” altogether.
The bishops accused legislators of “political pandering and appeasing a small group of very loud advocates.” And they made the obvious point that the men and women who passed this bill seem to have forgotten: “Erasing the terms ‘mother’ and ‘father’ from our laws will not help struggling New Yorkers afford groceries, access healthcare, or find housing, but it will further muddy what is true and good.”
The whole effect, they warned, “will be to mock the foundation of the family.”
On the Senate floor, Republican Sen. Dean Murray gave the lone speech against the bill. “These terms matter,” he said. “‘Mother’ is one of the most sacred titles you can have. As is ‘father,’ ‘grandmother,’ ‘grandfather.’” He noted that we think mothers important enough to set aside a day for them, and wondered whether New York would now mark “Gestating Parent’s Day.”
Congresswoman Claudia Tenney, who once served in the Assembly, was blunter still. “The party that can’t define a woman is now rewriting New York law to erase mothers and fathers,” she wrote on X. “Only in Albany could ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ become too controversial.”
New York Is Part of a Larger Trend
I wish I could say Albany was an outlier. It is not.
What New York is currently doing in a statute, other countries have been doing for years through their schools, courts, and clinics. Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and Sweden have all moved to write self-declared “gender identity” and preferred pronouns into policy and law, treating a person’s sex as something “assigned at birth” rather than recognized at conception. Here in the U.S. the Biden administration unilaterally pushed gender ideology into effect through numerous executive orders, which have thankfully been revoked by the Trump administration.
The claim underneath all of it is the same. Gender ideologues say that your body tells you nothing true about who you are. They argue that “male” and “female,” “mother” and “father,” are social constructs we are free to revise to fit our feelings. To heck with biology, facts, reality.
Pope Leo XIV spoke to this temptation in his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas [5], released in May. Writing against a culture that treats the human being as raw material to be improved upon, the Holy Father insists that a person is never “a project to be optimized,” but rather a being “called to relationship and communion.”
The late Pope Benedict XVI saw where this road led a decade and a half ago. In his 2012 address to the Roman Curia [6], he called gender ideology an “anthropological revolution” built on a “profound falsehood.” According to gender ideology, he said, “sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of; it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society.”
“According to the biblical creation account,” Pope Benedict continued, “being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. … Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will.”
Church Teaching: Male and Female He Created Them
Against all of this, the Church offers a teaching about who the human person is, and she begins where Scripture begins. “God created man in his own image … male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27). Our being male or female is not an accident laid on top of some sexless inner self. It is written into what it means to be human at all.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that a human person is a unity of body and soul, an “embodied soul,” and that the body is not a costume the real self happens to be wearing. As the Catechism [7] puts it:
The human body shares in the dignity of “the image of God”: it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul. … Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity. … For this reason, man may not despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honor since God has created it (no. 364).
The soul, the Catechism continues, is the “form” of the body; in a human being, spirit and matter “are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature” (no. 365). In other words, the body given to us at conception is not a prison and not a mistake. It reveals the person. And the sex inscribed in that body is real and given. The doctor who notes it at birth is recognizing something true, not deciding it.
How Gender Ideology Attacks the Family
In the same address by Pope Benedict XVI quoted above, the late Holy Father noted that gender ideology ultimately amounts to a profound attack on the family.
[I]f there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him. … When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defense of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.
As always, it is the children who pay. A child told from his earliest years that “mother” and “father” are interchangeable, that his own body is a problem to be corrected, has not been given freedom. He has been handed confusion.
There could be no starker illustration of this than a recent article [8] published in the New York Times to coincide with Father’s Day. The article is actually a series of cartoons, written by a woman who identifies as a “transgender man” (i.e., a woman who has undergone procedures and taken drugs to look like a man), explaining how her transgender identity has affected her child.
The purpose of the article is to “prove” that identifying as transgender is no big deal for one’s children. In reality, it amounts to a heartbreaking account of how an adult’s confusion transmits that same confusion to her child.
One of the cartoons depicts the woman’s daughter hanging upside down on monkey bars at school saying, “I want to grow a beard when I grow up.” When one of her friends says “You can’t grow a beard. You’re a girl,” the girl replies, “My dad did, and he was a girl.” In another cartoon, the woman and her daughter are walking together, and the girl is shown asking, “How long did you have breasts for, dad?”
The New York Times thought they were showcasing the normalcy of transgenderism. Instead, they were showing the devastating impact of gender ideology on the family, and on children. My heart breaks for that beautiful girl.
The Deeper Error Behind New York’s Bill
Governor Hochul may still veto this bill, and we should pray that she does. But the deeper error will not be vetoed away, because it did not begin in Albany and it will not end there. We have met it before, in the contraception that severed love from life, in the no-fault divorce which undermined the foundation of the family and has caused untold suffering to children, and now in a gender ideology that treats the body as a lie. Ultimately, gender ideology is simply the next step in that deepest of anthropological errors which states that man makes himself what he is, and thus can exercise power without constraint, rather than receiving what he is from the Creator, and should seek to live in conformity with his given nature.
The answer of the Church does not change. We say, without apology, that the body is a gift, that men are men and women are women, that every child has a mother and a father and deserves both, and that no legislature can repeal these truths by editing a dictionary.
The New York bishops are right. Words matter. Long before any legislature spoke, God spoke the first word about each of us. He made us male and female and called us very good. We are not free to unsay it. We are only asked to receive it, and to live as the sons and daughters He created us to be.