When a political campaign decides to call its opponent “tofu Talarico” and “six-gender Jimmy,” it has already conceded the policy argument — and the evidence in the Texas Senate race between Ken Paxton and James Talarico makes that concession impossible to miss.

At a Glance

• White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller falsely claimed Talarico is transgender; multiple news organizations confirm he is cisgender and heterosexual.
• Paxton’s “tofu Talarico” branding collapses on contact with reality: Talarico publicly eats barbecue, eggs, and cheese, and explicitly denies being vegan.
• Talarico’s “God is non-binary” remark was a deliberately provocative theological point rooted in Pauline scripture — not a literal claim about divine gender identity.
• Research on Senate campaign advertising finds that a candidate’s gender identity does not drive opponents’ attack-ad topic selection; partisanship and issue salience do.
• The Republican attacks on Talarico follow a documented pattern of identity-coded campaigning deployed when substantive lines of attack are unavailable or politically risky.

The Anatomy of a Fabricated Attack

The opening salvo came from Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, who posted on X that James Talarico is the Democrats’ “first transgender Senate candidate” and is transitioning to female — adding, for rhetorical flourish, that “blood doesn’t come out; soy milk comes out.” The claim is false on every factual level. Talarico is cisgender and heterosexual, a point confirmed independently by Yahoo News, Advocate.com, and Baptist News Global. Miller’s “soy milk” line is not a metaphor that gestures toward some disputed medical reality; it is a fabricated biological claim with no evidentiary basis whatsoever.

Ken Paxton’s contribution to the campaign was his first general election ad, which labeled Talarico “tofu Talarico” and “six-gender Jimmy” — framing designed to code the candidate as effeminate, culturally alien, and ideologically extreme. RNC Chair Joe Gruters amplified the message on Newsmax, asserting that Talarico is a vegan who believes God is nonbinary and wants to “mutilate children.” None of these claims survive basic scrutiny. Talarico’s rebuttal was characteristically blunt: “I’m an eighth-generation Texan. I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment.” At a campaign event, he consumed eggs and cheese — neither of which is vegan. The “vegan” label is not a slight exaggeration of a real dietary preference; it is simply wrong.

What Talarico Actually Said — and What He Meant

Two statements from Talarico’s legislative career form the factual raw material that Republicans have processed into attack lines. The first: during a 2021 floor debate on transgender student athletes, Talarico declared that “God is non-binary.” The second: in the same debate, he argued that modern science recognizes six biological variations based on chromosomal differences — XXY, XYY, and similar intersex conditions — and that sex is therefore a nuanced spectrum rather than a strict binary.

Talarico has since explained both positions in detail. On the theological claim, he cited the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians — “in Christ there is neither male nor female” — and argued that “God can’t be defined by human categories.” This is a recognizable move within progressive Christian theology, not a novel or fringe position, and it reads very differently when its scriptural grounding is visible. On the biological claim, he was explicit: “I know there are two sexes, men and women,” while acknowledging that a small percentage of people are born with chromosomal variations that complicate a strict binary. The label “six-gender Jimmy” misrepresents this position deliberately — conflating a scientific observation about chromosomal variation with a wholesale rejection of biological sex categories.

Republicans have treated both statements as literal confessions of extremism, stripping the context that changes their meaning entirely. That is not a charitable reading of an opponent’s words; it is a deliberate distortion of the public record.

Why Identity Attacks Get Deployed — and When They Work

The more interesting question is not whether these specific claims are false — they are — but why campaigns reach for this toolkit in the first place. Research on Senate campaign advertising finds that the gender identity of an opponent does not measurably affect which issues appear in attack ads; partisanship and the salience of particular issues in a given election cycle are the dominant drivers. In other words, campaigns do not choose identity-coded attacks because the opponent is genuinely gender-nonconforming; they choose them because those attacks are strategically available and likely to travel through partisan media ecosystems.

The mechanism is well understood. When a candidate is vulnerable on substance — Paxton carries a 2015 securities fraud indictment and a career’s worth of legal exposure — pivoting to identity-coded attacks serves two functions simultaneously. It redirects media coverage away from the incumbent’s record, and it activates a base that responds viscerally to cues about masculinity, cultural normalcy, and religious orthodoxy. The “tofu” and “soy boy” vocabulary draws on a specific manosphere idiom that associates plant-based diets with low testosterone and political weakness — a pseudoscientific claim that has been widely criticized but retains cultural currency in certain conservative media spaces.

The strategic logic is coherent even when the factual claims are not. What the research also shows, however, is that the effectiveness of this approach is not guaranteed. Studies on negative campaigning find that highly uncivil attack messaging disproportionately mobilizes male voters while potentially demobilizing female independents — a trade-off that matters in a statewide race. And Talarico’s campaign has actively worked to reframe Paxton’s attacks as evidence of distraction from corruption, a counter-narrative that has gained traction in mainstream coverage.

The Pattern Behind the Playbook

None of this is unique to Texas or to 2026. The use of gender, diet, sexuality, and religion as proxies for “strength” or “extremism” is a durable feature of American campaign communication, not an innovation of this particular race. What makes the Talarico case instructive is the degree to which the attacks have been documented, fact-checked, and rebutted in real time — and the degree to which the rebuttal has itself become part of the story. The DNC’s profanity-laden response to Miller drew as much coverage as Miller’s original post, which suggests that the attack generated a backlash loop rather than a clean narrative win for Republicans.

What the evidence establishes clearly is this: the specific factual claims Republicans have made about Talarico — that he is transgender, that he is vegan, that he believes in six genders, that he wants to harm children — are either false or are distortions of statements whose meaning depends entirely on context that Republicans have deliberately omitted. The attacks are not exaggerations of real positions; they are constructions built from selectively extracted fragments. That distinction matters, because it tells voters something not just about Talarico but about the people making the claims.

What Remains Genuinely Contested

There are real policy disagreements underlying this race. Talarico has been a vocal advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, including protections for transgender students. His 2021 legislative statements on chromosomal variation and divine gender were made in the context of opposing bills that would restrict transgender athletes and codify a strict biological binary into law. Those are substantive disagreements about policy and values — the kind of disagreement that a Senate campaign could legitimately be fought over.

Instead, Republicans chose to fabricate a version of Talarico that is easier to caricature: a transgender vegan who worships a nonbinary God and wants to put boys in girls’ locker rooms. The fabricated version is more politically useful than the real one, because the real one requires engaging with actual arguments about chromosomal science, Pauline theology, and the civil rights of a small minority of students. The caricature requires none of that. It only requires an audience that will not check the record — and a media environment willing to amplify the claim before the correction catches up.

Texas Democrats rallied around their nominee for the United States Senate seat being vacated by Republican Sen. John Cornyn during their convention Friday. Democratic Texas state Rep. James Talarico, a former public school teacher who is currently a Presbyterian seminarian,…

— Common Sense with Chad Law (@chadparkerlaw) June 29, 2026

Sources:

townhall.com, yahoo.com, advocate.com, npr.org, 19thnews.org, abcnews.com, youtube.com, cnn.com, facebook.com