Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico says he only waded into fights over gender identity and sexuality because Texas Republicans forced the issue, offering his most extensive public explanation yet for remarks that have followed him into his race against Republican Ken Paxton.
Talarico, speaking to The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro on “The Daily” podcast Tuesday, was asked about comments he made as a state legislator, including his 2021 claim on the Austin House floor that “God is non-binary” while opposing a bill barring men from women’s sports, and a separate 2021 statement to the Texas House Committee on Public Education that “modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes; in fact, there are six.”
Talarico told Barbaro he never sought office to debate those questions and said the controversy was manufactured by opponents clipping his words out of context.
“I was put in a position where I had to fight back against that extremism. So, you mentioned some of my comments on gender or on issues affecting trans people. It’s not like I ran for the legislature to talk about these things,” Talarico said, adding he ran on public education.
“It’s kind of ironic that they’re clipping these things to make it sound like I’m the one who was talking about this when, in reality, it was the Republican extremists at the Capitol who were obsessed with talking about trans issues, obsessed with talking about people’s private parts. That wasn’t me, that was them that changed,” he said.
Acknowledging the party went too far nationally
Pressed on whether Democrats overreached on cultural issues around 2020, Talarico said the national party may have, but defended Texas-level opposition to the state’s abortion ban and legislation affecting LGBTQ residents.
“These bills targeting LGBTQ people have real ramifications in our state, especially when they’re written to be overly broad,” he said. “I’m all for if we want to figure out when it’s appropriate for a trans athlete to play in a sport. That’s a policy discussion that we should have and an issue we should solve.”
He argued the sports bill Republicans ultimately passed was a blanket ban that “treated tee-ball the same as varsity baseball,” intended, he said, “to score political points off of the backs of a very small, vulnerable group of people in our state.”
Asked whether he agreed with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s assertion that so-called “Woke” politics went “crazy,” Talarico said he regretted not stating his views more clearly but did not regret standing up for his constituents.
“I certainly regret not articulating my position more clearly, in a more straightforward way to say what I actually mean… I’m not a perfect person. None of us are,” Talarico said.
He added that he was not trying to make a broader statement about the Democratic Party. “All I was trying to say is that I’ve said things imperfectly, and I’m going to keep working on trying to communicate more clearly and effectively,” he said.
Pushback from a conservative women’s group
Inez Stepman, senior policy and legal analyst at Independent Women, rejected Talarico’s framing in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“The left is always pulling a bait and switch with cultural issues. They advanced policies that placed males on girls’ sports teams, in locker rooms, in women’s prisons, and tried to push anyone who objected to that insanity out of public life. Now, they say none of this ever existed or isn’t important. But they don’t change their policy or votes. Not a single Democrat on the federal level voted for a bill to keep men out of women’s sports,” Stepman said.
Talarico has faced similar questions in other settings, including a “Jubilee”-style town hall where small business owner Sarah Gardner, who identified herself as a fellow Christian from Texas, pressed him on his past remarks about faith and gender along with his biblical justification for abortion rights.
Talarico told Gardner that his statement about God not being defined by gender was “provocative” but theologically mainstream, comparing it to remarks from the late Charlie Kirk and the late Pope Benedict. “Yes, I was doing it, maybe in an annoying way, I can admit that,” he said.
Paxton’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
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