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Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico said Monday that Republican attacks on transgender people are “culture war fights designed to tear us apart.”
“I mean, I don’t think we win by selling people out. And we’re refusing to do that in this campaign. This is a campaign of, by and for all Texans. And I think people are really tired of these culture war fights that are designed to tear us apart, designed to get us angry,” Talarico told MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow on her show.
“I mean, there are — there are difficult issues, trying to figure out trans athletes in sports, that’s an issue where we could actually come to a policy solution. But instead, politicians like Ken Paxton, they use those difficult issues to rile people up, to divide us, to distract us, in order to win power for themselves,” he added.
In recent years, the American right has increasingly focused on issues affecting the transgender community, such as gender affirming care and transgender people playing in sports categories aligned with their gender identity.
At the end of June, the Supreme Court ruled states can prohibit transgender girls from competing on girls and women’s school sports teams, keeping bans in Idaho and West Virginia in a 6-3 decision.
Talarico and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) are set to battle it out later this year for a Senate seat in the Lone Star State. Paxton has railed against transgender people playing sports in categories aligned with their gender identity, saying late last year that Talarico is a “left-wing lunatic obsessed with distorting Christianity to put boys in girls’ sports.”
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