Gender-Baiting Is Dehumanizing—And It Hurts Families Across the Political Spectrum
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
June 13, 2026
Elaine Godfrey’s Atlantic piece on the Paxton-Talarico Senate race is a sobering reminder that we are likely to see an ugly campaign season in Texas. Already, the attacks on James Talarico have moved beyond policy disagreement into gender-baiting, mockery, and false claims about his identity. These tactics are not only dishonest; they are dehumanizing.
Whatever one thinks of Talarico’s politics, no candidate should be reduced to insults about masculinity, gender identity, or sexuality. This kind of rhetoric does not merely target one public figure. It sends a message to every LGBTQIA perso—and to every young person who is questioning, searching, or simply different—that their dignity is conditional and that their humanity can be turned into a punchline.
That cruelty is especially painful because Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual (LGBTQIA) people are not abstractions. They are our children, siblings, cousins, parents, students, neighbors, colleagues, and friends. They live in Democratic families, Republican families, religious families, secular families, rural families, urban families, and every kind of Texas family.
Geez, human variation does not sort itself neatly by party, denomination, ZIP code, or ideology.
That is not “higher education gobbledygook.” It is lived reality.
So when political leaders mock gender identity or use anti-LGBTQIA insinuations to score points, they are almost certainly wounding people in their own communities—and quite possibly in their own families.
They may imagine they are attacking an opponent, but the damage radiates outward. It reaches the child listening from the back seat, the teenager in the pew, the college student afraid to come home, the parent who loves their child but now feels politically cornered into silence.
Most positively, this moment also reminds us that LGBTQIA people have never been merely the objects of ridicule or fear. They are agents of courage, culture, family, faith, scholarship, public service, and democratic possibility. Every year on June 28, communities around the world observe International LGBT Pride Day, honoring the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City—a watershed moment that helped catalyze the modern gay liberation movement.
Pride is not only a celebration. It is a public affirmation that people who have been shamed, criminalized, silenced, and excluded are fully human and fully worthy of dignity, safety, joy, and belonging.
Happy Pride Month, by the way!
This is why gender-baiting is so morally bankrupt. It asks us to move backward, toward shame and stigma, precisely when history calls us forward—toward recognition, repair, and love.
This is not strength. It is not faith. It is not leadership. It is the politics of humiliation.
Texas deserves better than campaigns built on ridicule. We can debate taxes, schools, health care, immigration, war, democracy, and the future of the state without stripping people of their dignity. In fact, we must. A democracy worthy of the name depends not only on votes and institutions, but on the moral discipline to recognize one another as fully human.
The truth is simple: LGBTQIA Texans belong to all of us. They are part of every community, including those that pretend otherwise. To attack them for political gain is to attack the sacred fabric of family, faith, and human dignity itself.
Reference
Stonewall riots. (2026, June 12). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
Paxton versus Talarico is already awful.
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Mark Felix / Bloomberg / Getty May 27, 2026 TWO THINGS are as certain as bluebonnets in spring now that Ken Paxton is the Republican nominee for the Senate in Texas: Democrats have a better-than-usual chance of winning statewide. And the next 23 weeks are going to be hideous. |
Paxton’s big win comes days after President Trump stuck his finger into the wind, determined that the incumbent, John Cornyn, was toast, and gave the attorney general his last-minute support. Even though the nearly 28-point margin was surprising, it was probably always going to be Paxton. A runoff tends to attract the hardest of the hard-core—the kind of determined voter who is willing not only to show up to vote in March, but to show up and vote in March, sit through 12 weeks of brutal attack ads, then head back out to the polls in May. The kind of Republican who might argue, as one woman did in Dallas when I spoke with her last week, that Paxton and Trump are bringing masculinity back to the party like Bambi’s father “coming out of the forest with those huge antlers.”
Now that these dutiful Republicans have secured the animated stag of their dreams, they will turn their attention to his general-election opponent: James Talarico, the 37-year-old Democratic state lawmaker and aspiring Presbyterian minister. In some ways, the two men have become avatars for their respective parties, which will spend the next five months ruthlessly attacking each other.
Paxton, a MAGA folk hero, seems even more committed to the movement than Trump himself is. As attorney general, he filed dozens upon dozens of lawsuits against Presidents Obama and Biden, and sued to overturn the 2020 election results. Paxton and Trump happen to share a strikingly similar ethical and legal rap sheet: Both men have been indicted (Paxton’s charges involved securities fraud and were dismissed after he agreed to do community service and take an ethics class); both have been impeached (Paxton was suspended by the Texas House but later acquitted by the Senate); and both have been accused of—and deny—infidelity. (Angela Paxton is now divorcing Ken on “biblical grounds.”)
Although Talarico doesn’t yet have Paxton’s name recognition, he does have strong youth-pastor energy and, at least for now, the moral high ground. As a faith-forward economic populist, Talarico has a core campaign message of love triumphing over hate, and little guys taking on the billionaires. Republicans know that they’ve got a tough race ahead of them, which is why they’ve already settled on a strategy: make Talarico seem like a weird dude.
Unfortunately for Democrats, Talarico has been more than a little helpful in this effort. In 2021, the state lawmaker said that “God is nonbinary,” a statement that is off-putting to some Christians, not because they believe that God is literally a man but because they can’t fathom why someone would drag God into the earthly debate over gender identity. Talarico has also said that there are six biological sexes and that he supports access to abortion, in part, because God asked for consent when he blessed Mary with the baby Jesus. As a candidate in 2022, he pledged to run a “non-meat campaign,” which was never going to play well in cattle country.
Lately, Talarico has been doing some backtracking. “I know there are two sexes, men and women. I also know there’s a very small percentage of people who have these chromosomal abnormalities, and I believe they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect,” he told CBS this week, adding that there are “some statements that I’ve made that I certainly regret.” Whenever Talarico is accused of being insufficiently pro-meat, his campaign circulates a photo of the candidate gnawing on a turkey leg at the state fair.
Still, both sides have heaps of material to work with. Which is why the next few months promise a total inundation of negative advertising online, and on the airwaves in Texas. Democrats will hammer into voters Paxton’s scandals—and the failures of Republican leadership. “Will Republicans get away with running a superficial attack campaign when Texans are really hurting?” Matt Angle, a state Democratic strategist, told me. “They’ve been in control for 30 years. If something’s broke, they broke it.” Meanwhile, Republicans are already parroting Paxton’s proposed “Tala-freako” and “Low-T Talarico” nicknames. This morning, the Trump adviser Stephen Miller wrote on X that Democrats have nominated their “first transgender senate candidate.” (Talarico is not transgender.) “We have not seen ugly yet,” Vinny Minchillo, a Texas Republican strategist, told me. They’re going to make Talarico “the woke DEI candidate of all woke DEI candidates. And pound him, pound him, pound him.”
The task ahead will be tough for Talarico, who will have to decide when to counter these attacks directly—Define thyself lest ye be defined, as the political maxim goes—and when to remain firmly astride his moral high horse. He will also have to fend off the unprecedented amounts of money that Republicans are pumping into the race in order to protect their fragile Senate majority. Already, Paxton has secured the backing of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which initially endorsed Cornyn and which, last night, dutifully scrubbed its website of all anti-Paxton press releases and ads.
Yet for Talarico, hope remains. No Texan needs reminding that inflation is high, or that the war in Iran has the whole world on edge and gas prices rising. Trump’s polling is bad, and among Texans, Talarico has higher favorability numbers than both Paxton and the president. In what might end up being a particularly good year for Democrats, victory is not only possible but achievable.
Still, if Democrats have done one thing well in Texas over the past 30 years, it’s dash hopes. The last time a Democrat came close to winning statewide in Texas was in 2018. Back then, Senator Ted Cruz beat Beto O’Rourke by roughly 215,000 votes. This time, the figure that Republicans have their eye on is 778,139, or the number of Texans who voted in the March GOP primary but who were not excited enough about either Republican candidate to vote in the runoff. A drop in turnout was expected. But a 36 percent decline “mirrors a lack of Republican enthusiasm we’ve seen in other states,” Minchillo said. For Texas Republicans, that number is “distressing.”
Last night on Truth Social, Trump congratulated Paxton and promised to hold a few rallies to help gin up some excitement. “Texas, this will be FUN!” the president teased. We’ll see.
