If he still believes that ‘trans children’ are ‘sacred,’ perhaps he holds even more sacred the chance to win this November.
In 2021 the Texas legislature was debating a bill to require that participation in sports from grades K–12 follow the sex designated on students’ original birth certificates. Democratic State Representative James Talarico, now his party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate, gave a short speech opposing it. A few months ago I watched it in order to write about its most controversial passage: Talarico’s statement, which he now describes as “provocative,” that God is non-binary.
To recap that speech: Talarico said that the bill was an attack on the very “humanity” of trans children; that it amounted to “endangering the lives of some of our most vulnerable children to solve a problem that doesn’t exist”; that it was “grotesque” in putting “someone’s damn trophy” ahead of even one child’s life; that it entailed “picking on kids” and “hurting children”; that it wrongly denied that “trans children are God’s children made in God’s own image”; that it further wrongly denied that “they are perfect, they are beautiful, and they are sacred”; that it was “immoral,” “a special kind of sin,” and “hateful.”
You may not have gotten the impression from this speech that Talarico “opposes trans athletes playing girls’ sports when it jeopardizes safety or fairness.” But that’s what one of his spokesman said a few weeks ago. Then, last week, the candidate himself made the same remark on Fox News, adding that he cares deeply about kids’ sports.
The closest he has come to explaining the difference between his 2026 stance, on the one hand, and his 2021 vote and speech, on the other, is that the bill should have left local communities in control rather than setting a statewide policy.
Yet this was obviously not the basis for his passionate opposition to the bill. His speech did not argue that localities should be able to treat trans kids as subhuman, endanger their lives, hurt them to solve a non-problem, etc. He said nothing about local control.
And his 2021 stance, on his own description of it, was not based on a policy judgment of pros and cons that might shift over time. It was rooted — again, based on his own words — on his deepest moral and even theological convictions.
I think this leaves us with three possibilities. First, Talarico didn’t really believe what he said back then. Second, he has changed his mind and decided that restricting girls’ sports to girls isn’t always hateful, a denial of people’s humanity, etc. — in which case he owes an apology to all the people he slandered. Third, he still believes what he said back then but is pretending he doesn’t out of political expediency. If he still believes that “trans children” are “sacred,” perhaps he holds even more sacred the chance to win this November.