Bias Report at U. Minnesota Claims Someone said ‘Mothers’ Instead of ‘Lactating Individuals’

Bias Report at U. Minnesota Claims Someone said ‘Mothers’ Instead of ‘Lactating Individuals’

How does something like this get fixed? It’s beyond Orwell.

The College Fix reports:

UMinn bias report: Someone said ‘mothers’ instead of ‘lactating individuals’

Someone complained that either a graduate student or a professor used biologically correct language when referring to women, according to a bias report obtained by The College Fix.

Among the more than 100 Bias Response and Referral Network reports filed between July 2024 and March 2026, were three that addressed the same controversy.

A graduate student reported someone for complaining about “having to change grant proposal language from ‘mothers’ to ‘lactating individuals,’” according to the October 2025 report. The spreadsheet only labels the alleged offender as a “respondent.”

The Fix obtained a spreadsheet of bias reports via a public records request. This one is one of the 15 percent that involve gender identity, sexual orientation, or gender expression.

Of the 117 bias reports, roughly 50 percent came from students at either the undergraduate or graduate level, while 29 percent of complaints came from staff, faculty, or professionals at the school. Nearly 20 percent of the bias reports came from sources with an unknown relationship to the school. Additionally, around 25 complaints specifically say the person reporting is “anonymous,” though none of the reports include the names of a specific person complaining.

About 1 in 4 complaints involve online communication or graffiti, while 10 percent concern students reporting professors.

One instance, in September 2024, involved a student reporting a faculty member for having a hearing disability. The student “reported that a faculty member’s difficulty hearing was impacting the classroom experience.”

Another report based on gender identity and religion was an Aug. 2025 incident where a student reported a street evangelist for saying “remember, only male and female,” and trying “to convert [the] reporter to Christianity” outside of the university’s Coffman Memorial Union.

Another report detailed how a student’s “rainbow safe space door mat” in a dorm room doorway had been “flipped over or kicked away.”

Meanwhile, 20 reports were classified as bias against national origin, and 40 reports were classified as bias against race.

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