Texans face a multitude of challenges. The border crisis. Incompetent utility regulators. Rising home and rent costs. Rural hospital closures. So naturally, as campaigning for the U.S. Senate enters its final week, incumbent Ted Cruz and his Democratic challenger, Dallas-area Congressman Colin Allred, are locked in a fierce battle over . . . transgender rights. Earlier this month, Cruz and an allied political action committee launched a barrage of ominous television advertisements accusing Allred of supporting “boys in girls’ sports,” “drag shows on American military bases,” “taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries” for military service members, and the use of “taxpayer funds to sterilize minors.” The ads are part of a nationwide push by Republican candidates, who have spent more than $65 million on antitrans ads since August.
“I remember reading the polls saying that the race was within two or three points and wondering what Cruz was going to do about it,” said veteran Texan lobbyist Bill Miller, who has worked with Democratic and Republican candidates. “And then I was watching TV and Cruz’s transgender ad came on. As soon as I saw it, I thought, ‘That’s it. That’s the issue they’re going to beat Allred with.’ ”
In 2023, Allred voted against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, a Republican-backed bill that would have barred athletes assigned male at birth from participating in girls’ sports. The bill passed in the House of Representatives on a party line vote but was not taken up in the U.S. Senate. Earlier this year, Allred signed a letter opposing Republican efforts to ban drag shows on military bases and restrict gender-affirming care for transgender service members and their families. In a written statement to Texas Monthly, Allred campaign manager Paige Hutchinson said “Colin believes we must stand united against all forms of prejudice and discrimination.”
Cruz campaign spokespeople did not respond to an interview request to discuss Cruz’s strategy. The senator’s campaign website boasts that “Ted is proud to stand alongside all female athletes and will continue to fight for their right to play sports on their own terms, without fear of being forced to compete against biological men.”
At first glance, the senator’s going all in on transphobia for his closing argument might seem puzzling, given that he’s spent most of his campaign stressing immigration and jobs. A recent poll conducted by the University of Texas at Austin asked voters to name their top political issue. A plurality (18 percent) chose the economy, which was followed by immigration, inflation, democracy, and abortion. Pollster Jim Henson told me that hardly anyone cited transgender issues as their foremost concern. A national Gallup poll taken in September asked voters to evaluate the importance of 22 campaign issues. “Transgender rights” came in dead last.
So why the last-minute pivot to transgender issues? “It’s an easy way for a Republican to paint their opponent as an extremist,” Henson said. “Even if it’s not a particularly salient issue, it’s very effective in signaling to moderates that your opponent is out of the mainstream.” Last year, a UT-Austin poll found that 63 percent of Texans—including 33 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of independents, and 89 percent of Republicans—agreed that the sex listed on a person’s original birth certificate should be the only way to define gender, with just 25 percent disagreeing. (Twelve percent of respondents said they weren’t sure.) “I suspect the Cruz campaign’s internal polling is showing what the external polling shows,” Henson said, “which is that for a Republican candidate, this is a pretty good issue.”
At least in his own ads—as opposed to those run by the state Republican Party—Cruz has avoided the use of the term “transgender,” preferring to focus on the issue of fairness in sports. Perhaps he has read the 2023 report from the Public Religion Research Institute that found that 71 percent of Texans support nondiscrimination protections for those who are LGBTQ. His campaign seems to believe that focusing on high school sports is a way to harness antitrans sentiment without alienating the moderate voters he needs to win. “Texas is sports-centric,” Miller told me. “Everyone here has kids, and most of those kids participate in some kind of athletics. Frankly, I wouldn’t want my two daughters to compete against guys. I don’t think it’s fair.”
The surest signal that Cruz’s gambit might be working is that his opponent has felt compelled to respond. On October 10, Allred’s campaign released an ad in which the congressman, speaking directly to the camera, assures voters that he doesn’t “want boys playing girls’ sports, or any of this ridiculous stuff that Ted Cruz is saying.” The Allred campaign declined to clarify the congressman’s stance on transgender athletes to Texas Monthly.
The ad infuriated some liberal activists, who saw Allred capitulating to Cruz’s antitrans rhetoric. “That specific language—no boys in girls’ sports—was very disappointing because it’s misleading,” said Mandy Giles, a Houston mother and the founder of Parents of Trans Youth. “I think Allred is still the better choice than Ted Cruz, but it’s still disappointing.”
Lost in the political back-and-forth is any sense of proportion. A 2022 study conducted by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law estimated that 0.5 percent of American adults and 1.4 percent of youths between the ages of thirteen and seventeen identify as transgender. (In Texas, an estimated 0.4 percent of adults and 1.4 percent of youths identify as trans.) A small percentage of this already small percentage competes in sports. During the past two sessions of the Texas Legislature, advocates for restrictions on trans athletes struggled to come up with more than a handful of examples of the unfair competition they were decrying. Perhaps because of the rarity of actual transgender athletes, Cruz has taken to attacking a nontrans athlete: female Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. The only evidence that Khelif isn’t a woman comes from the Russian-controlled International Boxing Association, which once barred Khelif from competition, claiming—without proof—that she failed a chromosomal test. Notably, the IBA disqualified Khelif only after she defeated a star Russian boxer. Some of Cruz’s TV ads feature a photograph of two underage Oregon girls—neither of them transgender—at a track meet. The girls’ school district has demanded that Cruz stop using the images.
Ridiculing women for competing in women’s sports is symptomatic of widespread confusion within the Texas GOP on the issue. Take the case of Mack Beggs, a former high school wrestler from Euless, a small town wedged between Dallas and Fort Worth. Unlike Khelif and the Oregon girls, Beggs is transgender. He was born biologically female but identifies as a man. As such, he requested permission to compete in men’s wrestling. In Texas, though, University Interscholastic League regulations require an athlete to compete under the gender listed on their birth certificate—just the kind of regulation Cruz supports—which meant Beggs was forced to compete against women.
In 2017, Beggs won the class 6A state championship in Texas high school girls wrestling. This was unfair, some parents argued, because Beggs had been taking testosterone injections. (His school district tested him and found that his testosterone was “well below the allowed level” for girls’ sports.) The solution seemed simple—allow Beggs to compete against men—but the Texas Legislature later passed legislation mandating that high school (and later college) athletes compete as the gender they were assigned at birth. (Previously, the UIL had allowed each trans athlete to compete if they first changed the gender on their birth certificate—a lengthy and complicated process.) If the female wrestlers whom Beggs defeated on his way to a championship had complaints, those should have been directed at the State of Texas.
Nonetheless, an anti-Allred mailer distributed by the Republican Party of Texas includes two photographs of Beggs and the slogan “Protect the Integrity of Women and Girls’ Sports.” In a phone interview with Texas Monthly, Beggs, who is 25 and now lives in Georgia, told me, “I competed against boys in USA Greco-Roman wrestling. But Texas state law said I had to compete against girls.”
Cruz and the Texas GOP have joined a long tradition of antitrans fearmongering. In 1933, Nazi vigilantes ransacked and looted the Berlin library of Magnus Hirschfeld, a pioneering German scholar of sexuality who coined the term “Transvestit” (“transvestite”). Hitler denounced Hirschfield as the “the most dangerous Jew in Germany.” Even as gay and lesbian Americans have gained increasing acceptance in recent decades, transgender and nonbinary citizens have remained at the margins of society, subject to legal discrimination and personal violence.
Medical experts say there’s a legitimate debate to be had over the efficacy of gender-affirming care and whether it’s being prescribed appropriately. But that’s not the debate that statewide leaders in Texas are promoting. Over the past few years, Texas has ramped up its legal assault on transgender children and their families. In 2021, members of the Texas Legislature proposed more than forty bills targeting transgender and nonbinary youth—more than were introduced in any other state. The following year, Attorney General Ken Paxton declared that some forms of gender-affirming care constituted criminal child abuse. Governor Greg Abbott followed up by directing the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents of transgender children. In 2023 the Texas Legislature banned the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy for kids considering or undergoing transitions. Many families with transgender children have subsequently fled the state.
Many academics, pollsters, and campaign operatives seem to view bashing trans children as clever politics. Abbott political strategist Dave Carney, for one, famously called antitrans policies a “seventy-five, eighty percent winner” in Texas politics. For those who are transgender, though, those policies can be a matter of life and death. A 2022 survey by the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ suicide-prevention group, found that one in five transgender and nonbinary children in Texas had tried to end their lives in the past year; more than half had seriously considered making that choice.
“I think it’s ugly and small to be attacking one of the most marginalized groups in our country right now,” said Giles, who has two transgender adult children. “These kids, my kids, are real people. Even if nothing Ted Cruz says is true, just him saying these lies [about trans athletes] and stirring up the pot like he does has an effect on kids’ well-being.”
