The First Step to Winning Back the Senate: Don't Nominate Anyone Who Said 'God Is Non-Binary' On Video
Certainly not in Texas.
Dear readers,
Joe Biden won 25 states when he was elected president in 2020, which means Democrats need to win every Senate seat in every state he carried just to get the body to a tie. Add in the one swing state Biden lost — North Carolina — and Democrats get to 52. This is why Democrats are at such a structural disadvantage in competing for the body. To be more robustly competitive, they need to be able to win even in states with strong Republican leans, like Ohio, Iowa, Alaska and Texas. To do that, the party needs a much stronger appeal to moderate and conservative voters than it has now. We cannot build a durable majority without their support.
So I’m a little baffled by something Democrats may be about to do in Texas, which is nominate a Senate candidate who got up in front of cameras a few years ago and declared that “God is non-binary.”
Donald Trump won Texas by 14 points in 2024, but we came within 2.5 points of winning a Senate race in the state in 2018. That’s partly because of improved Democratic performance in suburban areas since 2012, and it’s partly because Republicans had a significant candidate quality problem in the form of Ted Cruz. Next year, Texas Republicans may have a really big candidate quality problem: Their Senate nominee may be Ken Paxton, their scandal-tarred, right-wing attorney general. What we need in the state is a Democratic candidate who can peel off enough Republican voters from Paxton to win.
And yet the new hotness in Texas is James Talarico, a handsome 36-year-old Presbyterian seminarian who represents part of Austin in the state legislature. He’s undeniably charming, and he’s gotten a lot of mileage out of a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. But he’s a liberal’s idea of what a conservative might like: A clean-cut young man who’s adept at quoting scripture in support of a conventional set of liberal policy priorities.
As his primary opponent Terry Virts has pointed out in a short attack video, Talarico has one particular liability related to this that sticks out like a sore thumb. He made a bunch of out-there comments about sex and gender at a hearing where he argued against legislation that would have set a (widely popular) restriction limiting girls’ sports at schools in the state to female participants. At the 2021 hearing, Talarico offered a bunch of ideas about how both science and scripture cut against such a rule.
“Modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes,” he declared. “In fact, there are six.”
“God is non-binary,” he said, with unintentionally comical gravity, in another speech about the bill. I really suggest watching the video to get a sense of how these quotes are going to be clipped into highly effective attack ads if Talarico becomes our nominee in this race.
Virts, a former fighter pilot and astronaut who once commanded the International Space Station, has a clear argument about what’s wrong here: These arguments are out of step with the vast majority of Texans. We saw with the “Kamala is for they/them” ad that attacks on this issue can be highly effective, even if the comments made on tape are a few years old, and even if Democrats think people really ought to pay more attention to Medicaid cuts. So Virts challenges Talarico: How will he respond to those attack ads that will inevitably come?
I asked the Talarico campaign that question, and they provided me a statement from the candidate that does not give me confidence that he’s prepared to go into a general election and neutralize this issue in a race against Paxton.
I reproduce it here in full:
As I’ve said before, there are two sexes and intersex people.
When it comes to trans student athletes, I believe sports need to be safe and fair. These decisions are best left up to sports leagues and local officials — not politicians — with sensible limitations on who plays in competitive leagues.
This quote — pulled out of context from a nuanced conversation about a bill that would impact Texas students — represents what our campaign is running against: the billionaires and their puppet politicians who divide the rest of us so we don’t notice they’re gutting our healthcare, defunding our schools, and cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends.
We’ve noticed. And we’re done being divided.
The third paragraph is classic politics of evasion: a candidate responding to an attack on an issue where he is weak by saying the real issue is something else. This has not worked as a strategy for Democrats when they have taken unpopular stances on issues they’d rather not discuss, like crime, immigration, and what gender even is. The second paragraph, meanwhile, is an effort to fudge the question of girls’ sports by taking no position at all. This just isn’t going to be good enough to counter what voters will see in the ads: Talarico saying something bizarre, in support of an unpopular policy, in a way that shows he does not think like ordinary Texans.
The trans sports issue was also a problem for our Senate nominee in Texas last time around: former congressman and former NFL player Colin Allred, who is now running in the primary against Talarico and Virts. Sen. Ted Cruz attacked Allred over the issue, and Allred drew some annoyance from the left for an ad in which he insisted he does not favor “boys playing in girls sports.” But the problem was that — as Cruz hammered home in ads — Allred had in fact voted for legislation that would have prevented some educational institutions from segregating locker rooms or sports leagues by sex.
Virts, on the other hand, doesn’t have to defend or explain a vote like that, and has messaging designed to take the issue off the table.
“I don't think that biological males should be playing against girls in competitive sports,” he told me. “I would support legislation that protects girls and women and their safety, and also the fairness of the competition.”
Simple, and in line with my argument earlier this week that Democrats don’t just need to welcome voters who are on the popular side of this issue — they need to be on the popular side of the issue.
I want to dwell for a moment on Talarico’s “six sexes” claim, and his further comments (not included in the Virts campaign video) that “scientifically speaking, sex is a spectrum. Oftentimes it can be very ambiguous.” It’s an important example of how Democrats sometimes hug The Science along their way to expressing ideas so bizarre and off-putting that only someone with a Ph.D. could have come up with them.
There are not six sexes, as Talarico himself now acknowledges. “There are two sexes and intersex people,” per his statement this week. Yes: a male has a genotype that leads to the development of gonads that produce small gametes (sperm), while a female has a genotype that leads to the development of gonads that produce large gametes (ova). There are very rare cases where people develop a sexual phenotype that is inconsistent with the genotype. But Talarico said at the hearing that there are between 300,000 and 600,000 intersex people in the state of Texas — 1-2% of the population. This is an apparent reference to widely memed estimates that something like 1.7% of the population is intersex.
That’s a striking number — 1.7% is about 1 out of 60 people. That would mean there were several intersex people in your high school graduating class, or that being intersex is about as common as having red hair. This is why activists have convinced organizations to start using terminology like “sex assigned at birth” — the idea is that sex is so mysterious and complicated and confusing that a doctor can’t even be relied upon to assess it accurately by looking at a baby’s genitals. Instead, a sex is assigned and could be reassigned later. The alleged ambiguity of sex is relied upon as an argument for why we should conceptualize gender as a spectrum: You can’t rely on a sex binary to conceptualize gender if sex isn’t binary in the first place. And it’s used as an argument against organizing school sports by sex — if you do that, it creates a problem for the one of every 60 Texans who isn’t unambiguously male or female.
Does it sound plausible to you that the sex of one in every 60 Texans cannot be clearly categorized as male or female?
Both the 1.7% estimate of intersex prevalence and the definition of “intersex” that leads to it come from a 2000 paper by Brown University sexologist Anne Fausto-Sterling. She considers anyone to be intersex “who deviates from the Platonic ideal of physical dimorphism at the chromosomal, genital, gonadal, or hormonal levels.” But as physician Leonard Sax notes in a 2002 paper, this over-inclusive definition leads Fausto-Sterling to mostly count people whose gender is not at all ambiguous. In fact, about 90% of Fausto-Sterling’s estimate comes from her claim that 1.5% of people have one specific hormonal condition: late onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia (LOCAH), which leads to overproduction of androgen. Carole Hooven (the human evolutionary biologist who was pushed out of Harvard in 2022 for saying on Fox News that there are only two sexes) says that’s likely a large overestimate, and the real prevalence of LOCAH may be as low as 0.1%. But more importantly, having LOCAH does not make your sex ambiguous. Yes, females who have it can experience symptoms like acne, hirsutism, and infertility. “If a female has elevated androgens in puberty (produced by the adrenal glands, and which do not reach male typical levels), some masculine secondary sex characteristics are likely to develop. This does not make her any less female,” Hooven notes.
Other conditions, like Klinefelter syndrome, also get swept up in Fausto-Sterling’s definition of intersex even though the boys and men who have Klinefelter syndrome do not represent any kind of sexual ambiguity. Everyone with Klinefelter syndrome is male and has a penis (or, at least, has genes that lead to the development of a penis); they tend to be especially tall and lanky, but they generally have an overall typical male appearance and gender identity. As Sax notes, by Fausto-Sterling’s own numbers, only about 1 in 5,000 people have conditions that render them intersex in the core sense of having developed genitals that are discordant with genotypic sex or that are sexually ambiguous. That’s a lot less than one in 60.
But to step back, the big political problem here is the emergent liberal instinct toward galaxy-brain, well-ackshually there are six sexes-style argumentation. We could call it the party’s John Oliver problem — some Democrats’ excessive interest in counterintuitive arguments that only impress people who start from strongly liberal preconceptions. Sex and gender are subjects that everyone has a lot of direct personal experience with. And we know, from life, that sex is by and large not a difficult concept — there are males and females and, if you look at their genitalia, it’s almost always quite easy to find out who’s what. Then, some liberal comes around and tells you he’s read The Science and everything you thought you knew about that is wrong. Sex is a spectrum and actually quite confusing and difficult to assess. In fact, there are four new sexes you hadn’t even heard of! Very complex, very complex, you see. This does not make the liberal sound smart. It makes him sound like an idiot who’s easily drawn to fashionable-but-silly ideas.1
As for the idea that “God is non-binary,” Talarico’s fuller explanation was one for the annals of late-night dorm room philosophy:
The first two lines of the Bible, the first two lines in Genesis, use two different Hebrew words to describe God. One is the masculine Hebrew noun for divinity. The second is the feminine, Hebrew, noun for Spirit. God is both masculine and feminine, and everything in between. God is nonbinary.
I realize Talarico is not the first person to advance the (dubious, to my ear) claim that grammatical gender conventions for common nouns in ancient languages can tell us something about how to conceive of God. But the political problem with this argument is again the galaxy-brain element: the way it jumps from a maybe-interesting claim about language to a claim that the novel societal concept of non-binary gender for humans can be applied to an ancient and immortal god — and that this then tells us something important about whether you should have to be female to play on a girls’ sports team. This is likely to be extremely confusing to most people who consider themselves versed in the Bible.
On girls’ sports specifically, Democrats’ problem is that they’ve gotten on the unpopular side of an issue by arguing for something that was never morally necessary. But more broadly, on some of these social issues, Democrats’ problem is that they have gotten attached to a way of thinking that makes them overly open to implausible claims and overly impressed by rhetorical flourishes. Addressing the problem requires pausing before one speaks to ask, “Will I sound normal if I say this? Will I sound like I’m using rhetoric to camouflage a weak idea? Will I sound like I spent too much time talking to graduate students?”
If you ask yourself those questions, you’ll never make the mistake of saying “God is non-binary” in front of a camera.
Very seriously,
Josh
By the way, Democrats’ heavy reliance on implausible but-the-science arguments about sex and gender can’t possibly be helping with Democrats’ broader project of trying to restore public trust in science in areas where it’s really needed, like vaccine efficacy.
If you're Jewish, it's correct (but weird and misleading in context) to say that God is nonbinary. But if you buy that God was incarnated as a man, which most Texas voters do, it's obviously ridiculous. If you're a liberal Presbyterian, a tribe with which I'm extremely familiar, you are leaning heavily on the idea that Holy Spirit=Shekhinah=feminine, none of which is going to fit into a political soundbite.
A liberal Presbyterian seminarian sounds like the worst possible candidate for Texas Democrats, who start at a huge disadvantage. Don't nominate a liberal intellectual for God's sake!
I appreciate Josh's deconstruction of how Dems got themselves into this strange place they find themselves in today. A place where they cannot bring themselves to just state the obvious position that than 85% of Americans find themselves in agreement with. That position is that sports should be sex-segregated as they are today and men should not be competing against women in sex-segregated sports. Again, not very complicated and eminently reasonable, yet something the Democratic Party (and its candidates) seems to struggle with endlessly.