Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate seat in Texas says that there are six biological sexes

September 19, 2025 • 10:00 am

You may remember the attack ads on Kamala Harris put out by Trump’s team during the last election. Some of them singled out her statement that the government should fund gender transitions for prison inmates, while others mentioned that Harris wants to “allow biological men to compete in womens sports” (see video in tweet at bottom).  Most of these ads ended with the mantra: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” I have to admit that that’s a clever ending, though I dislike the general anti-trans tone of the ads. While I agree that trans-identified men (biological men) should not compete in women’s sports, these ads, aimed mostly at young men, rest heavily on a Republican foundation of anti-trans bigotry rather than on reasoned discussion of whether men should compete against women in athletics or whether taxpayers should fund gender changes.

Did the ads work?  (There’s even a Wikipedia page on them.)  Both that page and a HuffPo article show that the ads might have been effective in converting swing voters to Trump, but, on the other hand, might not have been. The evidence is mixed, though it’s pretty clear they didn’t clearly hurt Trump or help Harris.

From Wikipedia:

The ads, which had several different variations, aired more than 30,000 times in every swing state. The Trump campaign put the ads in heavy rotation during televised NFL and college football games and NASCAR Xfinity Series races. According to an analysis by Future Forward, a Democratic super PAC, “Kamala is for they/them” was one of Trump’s most effective 30-second attack ads, shifting the race 2.7 percentage points in favor of Trump after viewers watched it.  Conversely, an RCT study by Ground Media released by GLAAD, an LGBTQ media monitoring organization, stated that the ad did not have an impact on who viewers intended to vote for.

HuffPo (the surveys are different from those given above):

Republican ads suggesting Vice President Kamala Harris cared more about promoting transgender rights than boosting the economy likely contributed to Donald Trump’s victory, according to a new survey conducted after Tuesday’s election.

Another poll released this week by a different Democratic firm found, however, that hardly any voters were motivated by opposition to transgender surgeries or what Republicans derisively call “boys in girls sports.”

Here’s a video from Reuters discussing these ads:

The video says that Trump’s ad campaign was “against transgender rights”, suggesting that it was about more than sports or funding gender change in prisons. But these are only two forms of “transgender rights”, and for nearly every other right, I’ve argued that transgender people should be treated the same way as everyone else.  But because of the conflation of these different “rights,” and the fact that trans issues aren’t on most voters’ radar (voters care more about their own economic well being), it’s probably best for the Democrats not to pronounce on trans sports participation—or to proclaim that there are more than two sexes. And the number of biological sexes happens to be the subject of this post.

Some Democrats, it seems, just can’t seem to stay away from crazy pronouncements about sex and gender, and that could hurt us in the midterm elections. If I were a Republican, I would ask my opponent to tell me how many biological sexes there are. If they say anything other than two, they look mushy and woke, sort of like the Society for the Study of Evolution.

Reader Robert called my attention to the Substack post below by Josh Barro. reporting that the leading Democratic candidate for the upcoming Texas Senatorial election is saying things like “there are six sexes” (yes, six) and that “God is nonbinary”. Click the screenshot to read:

Who’s author Josh Barro? He’s described by Wikipedia this way:

Barro has expressed heterodox political views, and has criticized both major parties.

. . .On October 11, 2016, following the Republican Party’s nomination of Donald Trump for president, Barro said he had left the Republican Party and registered as a Democrat.  Barro cited as reasons for his decision the “fact-free environment so many of its voters live in, and because of the anti-Democrat hysteria that had been willfully whipped up by so many of its politicians,” which created a “vulnerability in our democracy.”

In November 2024, after Democrat Kamala Harris was defeated by Trump in the 2024 United States presidential election, Barro published a column entitled “Trump Didn’t Deserve to Win, But We Deserved to Lose,” wherein he broadly criticized the Democratic Party, including Democratic governance of New York City, where he lives. Barro particularly criticized Democrats for ineffectively responding to issues such as inflation and immigration, adding, “I am unfortunately a Democrat.” In February 2025, he wrote that “[t]he woke brigades in the Democratic Party aren’t merely annoying. They have undermined Democrats’ appeal to the same minority communities they are supposedly so focused on ‘including.’ “

Barro, then, seems to be a moderate Democrat who shares some of my opinions on the election.  And his column is largely about the Texas Senatorial candidate James Talarico, described this way:

. . . . an American politician, Presbyterian seminarian, and former public school teacher serving in the Texas House of Representatives since 2018.  He is a member of the Democratic Party and has been called a “rising star” among Texas Democrats.

. . . .. In September 2025, Talarico announced his candidacy for the 2026 US Senate race in Texas.

In that election Talarico, should he win the Democratic primary, will face John Cornyn, a Republican who has held a Texas Senatorial seat since 2002, and is now senior Senator above Republican Ted Cruz. Given that no Democrat has won a U.S. Senate seat from Texas since 1990, Talarico, who won his state House seat handily, seems unlikely to repeat that win for a U.S. Senate seat. But we need all the seats we can get in the Senate, and Talarico isn’t helping himself, at least according to Barro:

. . . 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.

(The video of Talarico’s remarks is below.) Shoot me now! What six biological sexes does Talarico favor? I want to know! And as for God being nonbinary, well, for an atheist like me that’s a non-starter, but even if you’re religious, how can you claim that God is “nonbinary”. The only evidence is against that: in the Bible where God is always referred to as “he”.  Barro goes on:

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 theyhave 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.

It’s too late for Talarico, who is religious, to take back what he said, but his attempt to “clarify” it just muddled the issue. It’s clear that Talarico does indeed believe there are six biological sexes, but realized too late how dumb that looked to the public, and in his correction erased 67% of the sexes. The quote was not pulled out of context.  See for yourself below:

 

Barro goes into the intersex issue, something you can read for yourself, showing that Talarico has apparently been seduced by Anne Fausto-Sterling’s claim that 1.7% of people are intersex, a figure that’s a huge overestimate no matter what you define as “intersex”—or even if you want to use that term.  Barro closes by returning to the number of sexes and sports again:

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.

Or like Steve Novella or Agustín Fuentes or any number of misguided academics and physicians. Barro continues:

. . . .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.

Note that Barro argues that one can recognize biological sex by genitalia, which isn’t precisely correct. It’s recognized by gamete type—large and small—and there’s a very high correlation between the gamete-producing apparatus of a person and the morphology of their genitals (doctors don’t look at gonads at birth). Beyond that, Barro is right. Democrats should not look like they just fell out of a coconut tree!

43 thoughts on “Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate seat in Texas says that there are six biological sexes”

  1. Ahhh…why why are Democrats wedded to these obviously ridiculous assertions about reality? Especially those that are not shared by the majority of the population!

    This person must think that they need to say there are more than two sexes so that they can remain in office. This must be due to the fact that a very small, but influential, minority exists in their constituency that demands this sort of fealty to delusion. At root then, it is a problem of the mechanics of our democratic system…the main culprits being the primary system and gerrymandering.

    1. I’d add first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting systems to that. Some form of ranked choice voting (preferably with None Of The Above as a binding, mandatory entry) would reduce the power of the extremes.

      As long as “progressives” control the primaries, the Democrats are going to have weak candidates in the general.

      1. Definitely in favour of having a “None of the Above” choice. In a multi-member electorate, if NotA is one of the winners then there would be fewer jobs for the (usually) boys. An incentive, methinks.

        And in a single-member electorate, if NotA wins then the elected number-two would have to endure the nickname “Number Two”.

  2. Well, that’s not a position that is going to make anyone very happy. The Progressives are going to be mad that he placed any limits on the number of sexes.

    As for god being non-binary, I am reminded of this quote from Xenophanes:

    The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,
    While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.
    Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,
    And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods
    Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape
    Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.

  3. If there was some sort of supernatural sky-god looking after the earth and all its children, a non-binary entity does seem the most plausible. A supreme Omni-being with a penis and small mobile gametes? That sounds crazy 🤪

    In reality, any kind of god sounds crazy to me.

    6 sexes? Good luck with that!

    1. Any details on what the 6 might possibly be?

      How about: Male, Female, Neither, Both, Undecided, and Confused.

  5. Laughable and ridiculous—except that some people will believe it, making the job of the scientist more difficult.

  6. Great jumping jesus! I’m beginning to think the Democrats just don’t want to win another election. They really need to get their act together.

    1. They are not bright enough or intuitive enough to understand that proudly proclaiming minority or erroneous positions doesn’t help to win elections.

      1. see Jeff Vader’s opening comment re: gerrymandering and primaries. Not only is it possible to win gerrymandered safe districts by espousing fringe ideas, but in many instances it is necessary.

        Both parties are trapped in a negative feedback loop: gerrymandering gives the fringes disproportionate power, which leads to more gerrymandering….

        Top five open primaries and some sort of ranked choice (see STARvote) in the general is our best hope of getting the fringes back where they belong – the fringe.

    2. This whole sex spectrum and > 2 sexes seems deeply embedded in leftist political thought. Ceiling Cat only knows how we can get rid of it!

  7. On a related note, a CNN article of Sept. 18 entitled “‘Harmed, outed, scrutinized’: How new sex testing rules affect athletes” contains an interesting, but also on some points perhaps somewhat misleading, discussion of the issue of trans and DSD atheletes in women’s sports.

    Remarkably, though ostensibly treating “How new sex testing rules affect athletes,” it never mentions with a single word how the tests would affect the hundreds of women athletes who will now be able to win medals instead of watching medal ceremonies in which they are awarded to men (or DSD athletes), or women to whom this has happened.

    1. This is a 2 + 2 = 4 thing for me. After puberty, the average male is better than the average female in athletics, and the best performing males outperform the best females. Therefore, open competition is unfair to females. It would be like having 10 year olds compete with 14 year olds. As such, there should be a separate division for biological females only. Biological males, defined as those with male reproductive equipment/gametes, cannot compete in this division.

      Done. It takes some rather stupid people, or in some cases very smart people like Neil deGrasse Tyson (who agrees that males outperform females, but thinks it is due to socialization and not biology therefore advocates mixed gender athletics as a way of correcting this negative socialization) to muck it all up.

        1. But of course it is socialization. It is the same with other species. Surely you don’t have an absurd idea that the size and strength difference between male silverback gorillas and female gorillas has anything to do with sex specific genes rather than socialization? Or the difference between bulls and cows or between male and female elephant seals? Surely it is all due to oppressive patriarchal gender norms that cause the males and females to be socialized differently.

          I can’t help noticing that Neil deGrasse Tyson DOES care about careful logical scientific definition when we discuss icy dirtballs such as Pluto that orbit the sun. But biological sex is whatever and who cares.

          1. He apparently cares a lot, actually. Check out his interview on Triggernometry. He gets rather “triggered” by the suggestion that post-pubescent males have inherent physical advantages over females in sports. His position is that the desires of men who feel they are women to compete in women’s sports must be accommodated.

        2. I was looking for his original comments on this…but I did find his backpedaling which led to an even worse suggestion:

          “What I see is sports is on the frontier of how to handle this frontier of people who are trans. It’s on the frontier of how to resolve that. And I’m making this up now: imagine the future of sports does not distinguish sex, it distinguishes and sorts people by hormone ratios,” Tyson said. “I’m making this up, but imagine that, if that were the case. That would be interesting. You get a hormone test, you’re in this range and then you compete against other people with the same range.”

          https://www.foxnews.com/media/neil-degrasse-tyson-explodes-during-debate-transwomen-competing-womens-sports

          This appears to be a bit of motte and bailey by NGT…admitting that yeah maybe there are some physiological differences between men and women, but grossly understating them. And then proposing this ridiculous “hormone test”!

    2. Helen Joyce (Ph.d. in mathematics, journalist, book author and now formidable women’s rights campaigner) tweeted the other day:

      Screening to check people are female before allowing them to compete in the female-only category is precisely the same as checking people’s date of birth for age categories, or weighing boxers for weight categories. It’s not unethical, it’s essential.

      Yeah, but trust the Dems to talk about the unfairness of “policing bodies”, and so on. They don’t get it how weird they seem to normal people. (Well, some, maybe even the majority get it, but they don’t want to risk losing their primary.)

      1. And how would progressives react to able-bodied athletes infesting the Paralympic Games? Scream blue murder or witter on about a continuum of ability?

  8. I honestly don’t know if God self identifies as nonbinary or polyamorous agender or genderqueer or what have you. I am not aware of any scriptures indicating that God prefers to be addressed by “they” or “zir” pronouns. But now that conservatives have come around to agreeing that sex is defined in terms of gametes, I would love to hear them try to put forth an argument that God is male. Jesus of Nazareth, regarded as the Son of God in some religions traditions, was thought male, but since he came into existence via parthenogenesis, he must have been chromosomally XX even if he had an intersex condition that made him appear male.

    1. God is at least Undecided. “Elohim” is plural, and AIUI it’s not a royal we. “Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” YHWH however is singular.

      This was actually once an area of intense theological debate, concerning “JEPD” and the “documentary hypothesis”. I advice not looking it up unless you are desperate to fill some unwanted spare time.

  9. On the biblical god being non-binary, well, this is somewhat less outrageous than it seems. While the metaphors and imagery relating to “him” are overwhelmingly masculine, one does find a non-negligible number of metaphors and imagery in the feminine.

    And most theologians would actually agree that the biblical god doesn’t actually have balls and a dick, produce sperm, have XY chromes and enjoy high levels of testosterone coursing through his veins. The biblical texts certainly present him as overwhelmingly (but not exclusively) masculine, but it would be a rare theologian who would assert that he is biologically male. Most would admit, at least in some sense, that he is neither male nor female.

    More liberal churches tend to see the biblical imagery and metaphors as just that, and leave it up to the individual to relate to their god as whatever gender makes them feel comfortable. More conservative churches tend to insist that the biblical norms are there intentionally and for good reason and are not to be flouted.

  10. Jerry quotes Josh Barro to this effect [emphasis added]:

    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.

    With babies, you probably need to look at the genitalia, to tell who’s male and who’s female. But for older humans, you can just look at the face to identify a person’s sex. Take for instance the two male boxers who won the gold medal in their weight class, competing against females, at the Paris summer Olympics: Lin Yu-Ting (Taiwan) and Imane Khelif (Algeria). No need to look at their genitalia. A close look at their faces tells you that they are male.

    Vicky Bruce et al.: Sex discrimination: How do we tell the difference between male and female faces? Perception, 1993, 22, 131-152.
    From the abstract:

    People are remarkably accurate (approaching ceiling) at deciding whether faces are male or female, even when cues from hairstyle, makeup, and facial hair are minimised. Experiments designed to explore the perceptual basis of our ability to categorise the sex of faces are reported.

  11. Re your comment “While I agree that trans-identified men (biological men) should not compete in women’s sports, these ads, aimed mostly at young men, rest heavily on a Republican foundation of anti-trans bigotry rather than on reasoned discussion of whether men should compete against women in athletics or whether taxpayers should fund gender changes.” I have to politely disagree here (and add that I’m not a Republican). The concerns about the trans insanity were out there long before it became an issue in women’s sports. Lots of women wondered what on earth was going on with the somewhat sudden onset of kids claiming to be the other sex, trans “reading hours” in children’s libraries, men in drag showing up in women’s restrooms, etc. And any suggestion that this was wrong or even just of concern, was met with heaps of scorn and criticism, heavily pushed by groups like Human Rights Campaign, Stonewall, etc., and backed by the Democratic party. (Let’s also not forget that a handful of billionaires, like Illinois governor Pritzker’s family, were quietly raking in millions in “gender-affirming care” facilities.) I don’t remember Republicans openly disparaging trans people before this wave began, or trying to shut down the many drag shows that women the world over have attended for years for laughs and drinks with their girlfriends. It’s only when this latest wave started infringing on women’s private spaces and shoving itself into children’s faces that people (including Republicans) started standing up and saying hang on a minute. (By which times lots of women had been vilified and assaulted for expressing their own concerns, especially in the UK. Thank god JK Rowling stepped into the fray there, as the government didn’t dare touch her.)

    1. JK Rowling is now despised on a part of the left. It’s so discouraging.

      How these kooky ideas got so popular is unclear. They defy common sense.

  12. I sent this to the Talarico campaign. I’d hoped he was an electable Democrat, but good grief, Texas has been an agricultural state until just recently and many of us grew up knowing cows, bulls, and steers, and the difference between ’em. Talarico is apparently a devout Christian; I guess if you can believe in the virgin birth you can believe in six genders.

  13. When asked specifically what are the trans rights they are so concerned about that they don’t have, there is a very stony silence.

    I can only assume the trans right they want is for everyone to believe and be compelled to believe they have changed their sex and to be treated accordingly. The problem is that this means a complete denial of women and by extension children’s rights and safety.

    A forced denial of reality is never going to succeed. Many people are rightly horrified at the fetishes that are paraded around under the guise of trans, not to mention the incoming medical problems that will inevitably arise from the ‘treatment’.

    This should not be a left right issue and the Democrats have for unknown reasons have wedded themselves to it. In the long term this maybe their demise.

    1. People who say they are trans shouldn’t have any special rights that come just from saying they’re trans. They aren’t brahmins or aristocrats. I think that’s what our host means when he says that trans people should be treated just like anyone else. If they display obnoxious personality characteristics like demanding that we regard them on pain of state punishment as the sex they aren’t, we should feel free to shun them, just as we do anyone else who is obnoxious. If trans people are over-represented among the shunned, they should reflect on why that is.

      That’s not bigotry. It’s just that we can’t make ourselves like unlikeable people.

  14. “Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate seat in Texas says that there are six biological sexes”

    They must have being reading Pharyngula, or something.

  15. The obfuscation of trans rights activists and their defenders was on full display on Piers Morgan’s show recently. Morgan repeatedly asked two guests (in separate episodes), Don Lemon and the leader of the UK Liberal Democrats, if they thought men who claim to be women should be allowed to compete against actual women in sports. Lemon dismissed the issue as unimportant and refused to answer, eventually becoming quite angry at Morgan for continuing to ask for his opinion. The UK Liberal Democrats leader also dodged the question repeatedly, leading a frustrated Morgan to ask him “Can a woman have a penis?” Morgan must have asked him that question 50 times but he flat out refused to answer every time, instead saying the issue should be debated in Parliament. Both episodes were hilarious but point to a blindness to reality on the left that will keep them on the losing side until they give it up.

  16. I just read this which, if true, is another bad look for the Dems:

    “Back in June, the House unanimously passed a resolution without a single objection honoring Minnesota House Democrat Leader Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark after they were tragically killed, while also condemning political violence. Every Republican joined in. Not one raised a protest, not one quibbled over wording. But when the shoe was on the other foot, when it came time to honor Charlie Kirk and condemn political violence, 96 Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to return the same measure of respect.”

  17. God isn’t nonbinary; He’s the male gender, thus supporting the separation of manhood and sexual reproduction in transgender ideology.

    Conservative Christians usually refer to and think of God as a Father, a King, and a clearly male form of Authority. Years ago I used to ask some of them to please explain exactly what made Him “male,” since he had no body and didn’t sexually reproduce. Answers usually made reference to a male essence, an attribute of Being beyond the physical which is fundamentally masculine.

    Atheists back then found this risible. A disembodied “He?” Silly Christians. Male and Female are biological sex categories. It makes no sense to assign someone or some-thing a sex-based identity without matching it to the biological sex.

    Little did I realize that many atheists would one day be doing exactly that.

  18. In the Book of Genesis, chapter 7, looks like God believed that sex is binary:

    “2 Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, 3 and also seven pairs of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth.”

  19. Jerry.

    I get the impression that you (like me) consider at an academic level “sex” and “gender” are different constructs.

    Sex is a biological one based around two forms with the odd coding mix-ups that put a bit of both in some manner.

    Gender is a psychological/sociological one and is more varied. Plenty of cultures see it in different ways.

    My biggest concern at the very least with both sides is they confuse the two and see them the same.

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