The battle between James Talarico and Ken Paxton has been overwhelmed by demagogic gender politics.
Austin—As the 2026 election cycle unfolds, the Republican Party and its allies are honing strategies to malign their Democratic opponents. In Texas, this mission has taken on a pointedly homophobic and transphobic tone, meant to humiliate Democratic state Representative James Talarico in his campaign for the US Senate.
The attacks span from merely disturbing to fully deranged. We’ve had Stephen Miller calling Talarico the Democrats’ “first transgender Senate candidate who is clearly transitioning into a female.” A joke about Talarico needing to paint on his facial hair. An image of Talarico’s face superimposed on New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s head. An AI-generated deepfake video showing Talarico dressed as Maria from The Sound of Music, singing a transgender reassignment surgery–obsessed parody of “My Favorite Things.”
It’s all part of a familiar playbook for Republican men, denigrating an opponent by aligning his performance of masculinity with femininity and queerness, and plotting it outside this grid of gendered expectations in which he’s expected to perform.
At their core, these attacks are responding to (and distorting) Talarico’s previous support for transgender kids, some of which he’s backpedaled on in response to the increased right-wing clip-farming. In 2021, right-wing publications zeroed in on comments Talarico made during a Texas House Public Education Committee Meeting regarding a proposal to ban transgender students from girls’ school sports, during which Talarico acknowledged genetic sex chromosome variations and insisted that the bill would hurt transgender kids. (The bill died in committee by one vote, though a revived version of the bill passed the following legislative session.)
And in 2022, while delivering a speech to the Texas Humane Legislation Network, Talarico stated that he was running a “non-meat campaign” supported by local vegan businesses for his third Texas House run, and that eating less meat was “necessary to fight climate change.” Besides reigniting the “burger ban” talking points favored by Republicans, the comments neatly aligned Talarico with the far-right’s insult of “soy boy,” a jab made at liberal men who the right claims are more feminine because their soy consumption lowers their testosterone (I will save you the Google search—it’s plainly false).
In truth, the mudslinging has nothing to do with whether Talarico is vegan, or gay, or trans (not even Talarico’s lengthy heterosexual dating history can convince conspiracists against the latter). It’s a convenient way of allowing Republicans to continue discriminating against queer people while also decrying Talarico’s candidacy, reinforcing the narrative that gay and trans people are a threat to American life.
Even the most mundane situations trigger these kinds of frenzies. On May 13, for instance, Talarico visited Austin restaurant Taco Joint with Texas Representative Gina Hinojosa (the Democratic gubernatorial candidate) and President Barack Obama. Talarico ordered breakfast tacos with potatoes, egg, and cheese. Online, Texas Republicans and out-of-state armchair food critics decried the meatless taco combo, though any Texan breakfast aficionado can attest to the taco’s legitimacy. After the taco incident, MAGA darling Ken Paxton, now the Texas Republican Senate nominee, called the Democrat “Tofu Talarico.” Trump posted about the Democrats’ “weird candidate,” adding, “Six genders, a real hit on Jesus.… Texas doesn’t like vegans.” (Talarico is a Presbyterian seminarian, but as always, facts are irrelevant.)
So what’s going on here?
Part of this assault can be explained by Paxton’s presence on the ballot. Paxton’s background hits all the beats of a corrupt comic-book villain. He’s an indicted alleged securities fraudster whose charges were dropped to the tune of $300,000 in restitution, who was impeached by the Texas House for corruption and bribery allegations (the Senate acquitted him), and whose wife filed for divorce after his reported infidelity.
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In other words, Paxton is a swollen, infected blight on the Republican Party’s pimply, sallow, buxomly botoxed facade, a standout star even amongst the most repugnant of Trump allies and associates. His shortcomings precede him, emitting a stench so sour that the most guilt-ridden of Paxton’s voters feel the need to save face and justify the mental gymnastics that shakily prop up their support. Compared to Paxton’s, Talarico’s career smells of roses.
Which is why Republicans exploit bigotry against gay and trans people to neutralize opposition to Paxton’s odiousness. If you can’t beat Talarico on priorities and policy, the thinking goes, then at least you can keep would-be supporters away by maligning his character, criticizing him for not meeting their suffocating definition of masculinity, and keeping the moral panic on a constant, low simmer.
The nickname “Tofu Talarico” is exactly the kind of projection that Paxton and Trump expect to work in Texas. For boomers and their favorite Fox News hosts, veganism has long served as a dog whistle for femininity, queerness, and weakness, used to diminish men and to subconsciously reaffirm women and queer people as lesser-than. It’s the cherry on top of their strawman arguments—the childless millennial and her avocado toast, the effeminate male leftist who lives in his mom’s basement, and the nonbinary Starbucks barista who dares to demand a livable wage and health insurance. This is what’s wrong with America; ergo, Talarico—a vegan-friendly, Jesus-preaching, childless, and wifeless representative for the greater Austin area—is their leader.
The intended slander contrasts perfectly with the Republican’s caricature of the ideal “real man”: the bro who eats raw meat and drinks raw milk, who rejects the welfare state as the blue-collar breadwinner for his wife and their 2.5 kids, who decries the immorality of the city from the safety of his Cybertruck, and who is Christian in a “put the Christ back in Christmas” way, not a “love thy neighbor” way. It’s the same mythos of masculinity they try to project on the campaign trail—the salt-of-the-earth family man who knows nothing of private jets or Ivy Leagues or cheating scandals.
Alas, this stereotype of masculinity isn’t inherently or uniquely Texan. (Take the 2016 presidential primaries, when Trump rolled out his infamous nicknames “Little Marco” and “Low-Energy Jeb,” meanwhile insulting Ted Cruz by disparaging his wife’s appearance.) But it is prime in a state whose dominant political party has successfully led the nation in rolling back rights for women and trans people.
The Trump administration and its Texas allies have magnified the scope of this playbook in harassing gay and trans people. They baselessly accuse queer politicians, educators, and parents of grooming, brainwashing, and abusing children, and baselessly accuse straight, cisgender allies of being closeted and doing the same. It’s an update of the narrative that fueled discriminatory legislation, political campaigns (see Anita Bryant), and hate crimes against queer people in the half-century prior. It’s also a strategy that seeks to distort and extinguish protections for trans people, thereby extinguishing trans people themselves.
As more queer couples and parents of trans kids find themselves with little choice but to leave Texas for safer ground, the roots of this right-wing narrative grow deeper. In this year’s Texas primaries, “transing the kids” became an accusation thrust upon the most conservative of candidates. Former Texas representative Mayes Middleton, who won the Republican primary for Texas attorney general over Representative Chip Roy, claimed that Roy “sided with the trans lobby to allow child transgender surgeries,” while Middleton “banned men” from girls’ sports and supported “kicking perverts” out of women’s restrooms. Even Senator John Cornyn’s campaign ads accused Paxton of approving funding for a center that offers “gender programs for children” and “child-accessible drag shows.”
The attacks on trans people are beyond rhetorical. This month, Paxton sued the city of Denton, Texas, over its plans to provide gender-neutral changing rooms during a private Pride swim party at a public pool, citing its violation of Texas’s bathroom ban law that went into effect last year. By the time Paxton filed the suit, the Pride event organizers had already scrapped their plans for the gender-neutral changing rooms, but that didn’t stop Paxton from later declaring “a major victory for the privacy and safety of women and children.”
Couched in these demands for so-called traditional values is the implication that gayness and transness are inherently bad. Which is why Republicans are so insistent that Talarico’s support of trans Texans is worse than anything Paxton has ever done—like threatening to separate trans kids from their parents, validating Robert F. Kennedy’s crackpot theories about autism, defending our God-given right to transmit Covid-19 through the pandemic, and cheating on his wife. Pinning the nation’s failures on queer people is far easier than providing an alternative vision for a brighter future. Even Paxton’s own campaign website lists carrying Trump’s agenda and defeating “the most radical Democrat in Texas history” as two of his eight priorities.
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None of this is surprising from Republicans. But perhaps the most disappointing part of all of this is that Paxton’s smear campaign is working. Take Talarico’s recent appearance on the podcast of Houston attorney Dan Cogdell. When Cogdell asked him to respond to the accusation that he’s “pro-sex surgery for minors,” Talarico defended himself: “Well, just on that particular accusation, I oppose gender reassignment surgeries for minors.” It’s a devastatingly ignorant response, spiking an opportunity to reframe the narrative around gender-affirming care for trans children.
Talarico could have countered the question with education—that treatment for kids with gender dysphoria rarely involves gender-affirming surgery and more often focuses on socially transitioning. But instead of advocating for trans healthcare and correcting the record, Talarico and his campaign decided to mollify and validate right-wing detractors at the expense of trans kids. Despite Paxton’s best assertions, Talarico is not the witch that they long to burn, which is a shame for Texans depending on Talarico to fight for them.
Earlier this month, the city of Round Rock, Texas, celebrated its fifth annual Pride festival. Delivering his remarks, Mayor Craig Morgan shared that he’d received critiques demanding that he renounce Pride. “As long as I am mayor, there will be a [Pride] proclamation.” I share this because Round Rock is where Talarico was born and where we both grew up. I had classmates who went on to work for his earlier political campaigns, and in turn I came to know classmates he grew up with. We’re both graduates from the University of Texas at Austin, where we fueled our studies with the mighty breakfast taco. Talarico knows this level of courage—why won’t he display it?
I can only hope that Paxton continues to suffer a lifetime of public humiliation, among them the loss of his senatorial campaign in November. But for that to happen, Talarico needs to give the Texas GOP a campaign worthy of their propaganda. The trans slander against Talarico and his allies will persist no matter the tack he takes on trans rights—so advocating for marginalized Texans is the only way through. Without their faith, he’s likely to find himself as many Democratic candidates have felt come November—holy and hollow, having shot themselves from feet to face in order to please transphobic detractors who crave their capitulation.
Samantha GrassoSamantha Grasso is a writer from Austin, Texas. She is a cofounder of the worker-owned publication Discourse Blog, where she is a graphic artist and produces the podcast Discourse Pod.