Some Parents Say the Anti-Talarico Ads Are Exposing Their Kids to Trans Issues

A post on r/Conservative said the attack ads on James Talarico were how the poster’s kids learned what “transgender” meant. Other parents and a grandmother have posted similar complaints.

Last week, a post on r/Conservative, a large Reddit forum for conservatives, complained about the TV ads attacking James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas. “My kids didn’t even know what transgender meant until these ads started airing,” the poster wrote.

Talarico, a state representative, is running against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee. The poster wrote, “I’m in Texas, and it seems like every commercial break has 4–6 political ads, most of them attacking James Talarico,” and said the ads “seem to talk about these issues more than anyone else does.”

“I get the angle,” the poster wrote, describing it as keeping “these people away from influential positions within our government.” The post ended, “But we’re practically talking the very things we don’t want into existence.”

A screenshot of the post, when I saw it, showed 323 upvotes and 84 comments. I posted it on X on the afternoon of Oct. 21, and by that evening it had been viewed more than 400,000 times.

“There’s a new backlash forming,” I wrote: “parents mad at Republicans for exposing their kids to the concept of transitioning through constant advertising.” Other parents and a grandmother have posted similar complaints in recent weeks.

The posts

One parent wrote on X last week that they had signed up for YouTube Premium, which has no ads, “because my kids were asking about genders in Ken Paxton ads.” The parent wrote that YouTube should stop showing the ads “on channels kids watch.”

A grandmother in Texas who calls herself a Republican wrote that her 4-year-old grandson saw what she called Paxton’s commercial “pop up on his kid’s program.” “A four-year-old child should not hear about trans during his kid shows on YouTube,” she wrote, adding, “we can thank the Paxton ads for that.”

YouTube’s rules ban “political paid ads of any kind” on content set as “made for kids” and on supervised accounts, and its YouTube Kids app bans them too. One of the grandmother’s posts says the ad was “even going on youtube kids,” but none of the posts names the video, so it isn’t clear whether those rules were broken.

Allison Mitchell, the Democratic nominee for a Dallas seat in the Texas House, wrote on Facebook on Oct. 21 that her 7-year-old daughter had seen an attack ad on Talarico. “All she heard was, ’This man wants to take parents away from their kids,’ and of course she became frightened,” Mitchell wrote.

Another parent tagged Disney+ and the GOP in a post asking not to get “Talarico supports trans ads” while watching Disney with their daughter. On Oct. 21, a viewer asked Peacock for “an ad free version of world championships,” writing, “I’m tired of hearing about how Talarico will put me to jail for not transitioning my kids while they’re in school.”

Others complained about how often the ads run. One person who replied to my post wrote that the ads are “across all media,” and that “it’s like having the word transgendered fried into your brain every day down here.”

An X user in Texas asked, “can we keep the ads family friendly?” That post complained about ads on both sides: ads saying Talarico “loves trans children,” and ads saying Paxton let “some child molester off with a slap on the wrist.”

One parent wrote on Oct. 1 that they were “very proud” that their 11-year-old daughter and “her liberal friends make fun of all the dumb sh!t Talarico has said.” The parent explained how the daughter would know: “commercials are all over YouTube and almost every streaming service.”

In September, a mother who wrote that Talarico’s ads “with him speaking directly to people are really effective” also wrote that the Paxton ads with “ominous transgender warnings” were “almost comical.” After one aired during football, she wrote, her son said “the transgenders” in “a deep scary voice” and laughed.

On Oct. 19, a parent wrote that their 9-year-old daughter had gotten scared because of “the misleading Talarico ads flooding YouTube.” The daughter was afraid that if Paxton wins, “he’ll release pedos from prison to roam the streets,” the parent wrote.

The ads

Talarico’s opponents had spent $37 million on ads attacking him over trans issues since Sept. 6, Popular Information reported on Oct. 1. That included more than $30 million from Texas PAC, a super PAC created by Senate Republican leaders, mostly on broadcast TV.

MAGA Inc., Trump’s super PAC, spent more than $4 million on streaming ads, and Elon Musk’s America PAC spent $1.3 million on digital ads, the outlet reported. Nationally, a FactCheck.org search of AdImpact’s ad-tracking database found, as of Oct. 12, more than $100 million spent since Aug. 1 on more than 200 ads containing the words “sex change,” including more than $77 million in Senate races.

One Texas PAC ad says Talarico “supported using taxpayer dollars for sex change surgeries on young children.” PolitiFact rated that claim False, writing that Talarico “did not vote in support of public funding for surgeries for young children.”

According to PolitiFact, the ad rests on his 2023 vote against SB 14, which banned gender-transition care for minors and public money for it and which he has said was too broad. Talarico said on a podcast in June, “I oppose gender-reassignment surgeries for minors,” and his campaign’s press secretary, JT Ennis, told FactCheck.org, “These ads are lies.”

Another Texas PAC ad, which ran on Meta in late September, featured a woman named Miriam, “a mom of five,” who said Talarico supports putting “parents in jail if they do not support surgically transitioning their children.” Popular Information reported that the only source the ad cited for that claim was a 2019 Houston Chronicle article about a custody bill, and that the bill “had nothing to do with surgeries or criminal proceedings.”

At a hearing on that bill, Talarico, who opposed it, said it was “abusive” to deny a child’s gender identity, according to Popular Information. The ad was made “inactive” on Meta about two hours after Popular Information contacted Texas PAC and the woman in the ad, the outlet reported.

Viewers have described ads with similar claims since then, including in the Peacock and Mitchell posts. Neither post says who paid for the ads they describe.

Dade Phelan

Dade Phelan, a Republican who was speaker of the Texas House from 2021 to 2025, told Texas Monthly in an interview published Oct. 14 that Republicans are “still running transgender ads.” “It’s just not resonating,” he said.

“The 8 to 10 percent of voters in the middle who are going to decide this election, when they hear stuff about boys in girls’ sports, they don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Phelan said. “This never happened in their communities, and they’ve been hearing about it for so many years, and so many other people have been accused of it.”

Phelan helped lead the House’s 2023 impeachment of Paxton, calls Talarico “a friend of mine” and told Texas Monthly he is skipping the Senate race. “There’s not a world in which I can vote for a Ken Paxton,” he said.

Early voting in Texas started Oct. 19 and runs through Friday, Oct. 30, and Election Day is Nov. 3. “Constantly talking about the things we oppose is actually giving them more attention than they would otherwise receive,” the r/Conservative post said.

A post on r/Conservative last week, in a screenshot I posted on X. The poster’s username has been removed.