On Wednesday, James Talarico — the Austin state representative and Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas — told Fox News that he would oppose transgender athletes in girls’ sports if doing so endangered “safety or fairness.” “Every sport has to be safe and fair,” he told Special Report’s Brooke Taylor, who had asked him about “biological men competing in women’s sports.” When she brought up the “six genders” clip that Ken Paxton has been running against him since May, he didn’t defend it: “I missed the mark on some of my past statements, I’ll be the first to admit it. There are not six sexes, there are two.”
The backlash was immediate. Brad Pritchett, the CEO of Equality Texas, asked, “When did people of moral standing decide to use Texas children as a political football?” The podcaster June Sternbach warned that “first, it’s Democrats needing to disavow trans women in sports to get elected, next it’ll be agreeing to ban access to HRT.” The Texas Tribune called it a reversal, and by Thursday a lot of trans people online had reached for the phrase we always reach for: he’s throwing us under the bus.
I understand why people are frightened. Many trans people have already had to flee their homes for blue states and cities — the Williams Institute found last year that nearly half of trans adults had moved or were considering it — and the streamer class has conditioned the rest of us to expect that more discrimination is always coming. But things do not always get worse. They sometimes get better. To protect trans people as they are in blue cities, Democrats need to build and hold power. To do that, we need to allow our allies some rhetorical flexibility. This is what that looks like. Because the alternative on the ballot is Ken Paxton, and there is no comparison between these two men.
What Paxton has actually done
It’s easy to lose track of Paxton’s record on trans people, because there is so much of it. Let’s start in February 2022, when he issued a legal opinion declaring that puberty blockers and hormones for trans kids “can legally constitute child abuse.” The opinion was nonbinding — I wrote at the time, at Media Matters, that it did not change Texas law — but it didn’t need to. Within the week, Governor Greg Abbott cited it to order the state’s child-welfare agency to investigate the parents of trans children, with “criminal penalties” for the doctors, nurses, and teachers who failed to turn them in.
Four months later, Paxton’s office asked the Department of Public Safety for the number of Texans who had changed the sex on their driver’s licenses — “male to female and female to male for the last 24 months, broken down by month” — and said it might later need “DL/ID numbers” and “a list.” DPS employees counted 16,466 changes before the agency decided the data “neither exists nor could be accurately produced.”
In November 2023, he demanded the medical records of Texas kids from Seattle Children’s Hospital and from QueerMed, a telehealth clinic in Georgia — providers in states where that care is legal and where a Texas attorney general has no business. (Seattle Children’s sued, and he dropped the demand the following April.) In February 2024, his office served PFLAG, the support group for families of LGBTQ kids, with a demand for its communications with Texas families; this March, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that he can have them. In August 2024, at his prompting, DPS stopped honoring court orders that change the sex on a license, and the head of the driver’s license division told staff to email “the names and identification numbers of people seeking to change their sex on their license” to a designated inbox.
He has sued doctors under the state’s 2023 ban on transition care for minors; this February, he went after Children’s Health System of Texas and a Dallas pediatric gynecologist over nineteen patients, calling the doctor a “criminal extremist.” He has petitioned to put Dallas school officials under oath over trans athletes, promising that “ISD officials who have participated in this madness will be held accountable.” In June, he sued the city of Denton to stop a Pride swim day at a community pool, because “cities cannot disregard Texas law by allowing men to change with young kids.” And on the night he won the Republican nomination, from a stage in Plano, he introduced his opponent to Texas as “Six-Gender Jimmy” and “Low-T Talarico.”
I can’t think of another elected official in the country who has used the machinery of a state — its child-welfare agency, its driver’s license files, its subpoena power — against trans people this relentlessly, simply for existing. If he wins in November, he will bring that same energy to the body that writes federal law.
What Talarico has actually done
Talarico’s record is the opposite. In 2021, when the Texas House debated a bill banning trans kids from school sports at every age, he said the state was trying to “police people’s private parts” and compared the exclusion to the arguments once used to keep Black athletes off the field. He voted against the 2023 law banning transition care for minors — the same law Paxton is now using to sue doctors. That November, arguing against a bill to hang the Ten Commandments in every classroom, he asked a Republican colleague why “having a rainbow in a classroom is indoctrination and not having the Ten Commandments in a classroom.” When he launched this campaign last September, he refused the premise of the whole fight: “Trans people are one percent of the population… Trans people aren’t taking away our health care.”
In January, I wrote that his conversation with Ezra Klein — where he said the Republican sports ban’s goal “was not to solve a problem” but “to score political points off the backs of a vulnerable community” — was a model for how Democrats should engage these attacks instead of fleeing them. The Human Rights Campaign endorsed him in June.
After Paxton won the runoff, Talarico started giving up the sound bites. Within two days, he called the “God is nonbinary” and “six sexes” lines “cringey” on CBS, while accusing Paxton of “clipping my cringey comments to distract from his career of corruption.” In June, he told a podcast that he opposes gender surgeries for minors, which has been the position of trans advocates for as long as I can remember. And on Wednesday, he said he would oppose trans athletes in girls’ sports if it endangered “safety or fairness.”
Rhetorical softening is not the same thing as abandonment. Look at what Talarico actually said. Asked about “biological men,” he answered about “trans athletes.” He said “safety or fairness.” He said, of his votes, that “I supported amendments that would have given the power to make these decisions to local communities — like conservatives used to believe.” That is effectively the position of the Biden administration.
In April 2023, the Department of Education proposed a rule that would have barred schools from imposing blanket bans on trans athletes while allowing them to set limits that were “substantially related to … fairness in competition or prevention of sports-related injury,” with more room to restrict in high school and college than in elementary school. (The rule would have been issued under Title IX, the law banning sex discrimination in schools.) No categorical bans, decisions made close to the field, safety and fairness as the test: that is Talarico’s answer on federal letterhead. The Biden administration then sat on the rule for twenty months and withdrew it on December 20, 2024, after the election, a walk-back I noted without much enthusiasm when I wrote about why I was voting for Kamala Harris anyway. Nobody spent a week accusing Joe Biden of throwing trans people under the bus.
Compare Talarico to Colin Allred, the last Democrat to run for this seat. Allred answered the same attack in 2024 by saying “I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports,” and he wouldn’t say the word “transgender” at all. The journalist Erin Reed called it the first time a major Democratic candidate had “acquiesce[d] to anti-trans messaging,” and Allred went on to lose by more than eight points. Paxton’s own response to Talarico this week was that he “voted against TWO bills that would have prevented men from playing in women’s sports.” Allred said “boys.” Paxton says “men.” Talarico said “trans athletes,” and I think that shows a lot more respect and thoughtfulness than either. A politician who reaches for “boys” or “men” has told you what he thinks we are. One who says “trans athletes” and “safe and fair” would rather argue about the rule than about whether we exist, and in Texas that is close to the most a Democrat will be able to afford.
Politics is about hard choices
In 1996, running for the Illinois state Senate, Barack Obama filled out a questionnaire for a Chicago gay newspaper: “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.” By 2004, he was “not a supporter of gay marriage.” Running for president in 2008, he told a church forum, “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian … it is also a sacred union.” In 2010, his views were “evolving,” and in May 2012, six months before his reelection, he told ABC that same-sex couples should be able to marry. His strategist David Axelrod later wrote that the shift off the 1996 position was political, noting that “opposition to gay marriage was particularly strong in the black church,” and that after one more event defending the man-and-a-woman line, Obama complained to him, “I’m just not very good at bullshitting.”
On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges, and same-sex marriage became the law of the land — with Obama’s own solicitor general, the administration’s top lawyer at the Court, having argued for it. The people who were furious at Obama in 2008 were right about what he said. They were wrong about what it meant. Politics is about hard choices, and the hard choice is rarely whether you’d like a candidate to say the perfect thing. It’s whether you’d rather have someone who says the imperfect thing and votes with you, or someone who says the perfect thing about you to a crowd in Plano and means every word.
Democrats are holding the line
For the last twenty months, the thing standing between Donald Trump and a federal anti-trans law has not been the courts. I wrote in July that the Supreme Court has shut that door. It certainly hasn’t been the executive branch, which is currently searching the military’s electronic health records for anyone “with a current diagnosis or history of or exhibit symptoms consistent with gender dysphoria.” It has been Democrats in Congress, and they’ve done it from the minority.
On January 14, 2025, the House passed a national ban on trans girls in girls’ sports, 218 to 206, with two Democrats (both from Texas) voting yes. On March 3, it reached the Senate and died, 51 to 45, with every Democrat voting no. Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, who is up for reelection in a state Trump carried, called it “overreach” that would subject “the bodies of adolescent student athletes — children — to intrusive investigation by the federal government.”
In June 2025, the big Republican tax-and-spending bill — written to pass the Senate with a bare majority — arrived carrying a ban on Medicaid paying for trans care at any age; the parliamentarian, who referees the Senate’s rules, ruled that it needed sixty votes, and Republicans stripped it out rather than lose the bill. In January, Democrats negotiated dozens of anti-trans riders out of the package that funds the government through this month, including provisions that would have cut off federal money for trans care at any age and threatened school funding over bathrooms. In March, the Senate blocked a trans-athlete amendment to the Republican voting bill, 49 to 41. In July, every House Democrat present voted against writing the trans military ban into statute, and with the help of four Republicans they defeated it, 212 to 217. The House did pass two narrower anti-trans amendments to the defense bill that same night, and five Democrats voted for one of them, but that bill has since stalled in the Senate.
In twenty months, not one of those bills has become law. But Democrats have held that line from the minority, relying on the sixty-vote rule, and if Republicans keep the Senate, it will hold only as long as they decide that trans kids aren’t worth scrapping the filibuster over. A majority decides what comes to the floor in the first place. A Democratic senator from Texas would be one more vote toward a Democratic majority, and in a Democratic Senate, anti-trans bills won’t need to be defeated 51 to 45, because they will never come up for a vote at all.
Eyes on the ball
The Texas Tribune’s polling average has had Talarico slightly ahead of Paxton since the runoff, better than Beto O’Rourke ever polled against Ted Cruz. Emerson’s August survey had it 47 to 46 for Paxton, with voters under fifty breaking for Talarico by fifteen points. Early voting starts October 19.
Winning in Texas is going to require taking positions that don’t sound great in Seattle. And ironically, the wave of people decrying Talarico for “throwing trans people under the bus” over a clause about safety and fairness is probably doing more than anybody to telegraph to moderate voters that he’s a sane alternative to Paxton. I’d rather they didn’t, but I notice that it works.
Ken Paxton asked the state of Texas for a list of everyone who had changed the sex on their driver’s license. James Talarico said that sports should be safe and fair. If you can’t yet bring yourself to trust Talarico, consider instead what Paxton has already done with the power he has, and what he would do with more. On November 3, Texas will pick one of them.
