He then immediately began portraying his general-election opponent, Democratic Texas State Representative James Tallarico, as insufficiently masculine.
“My opponent is the most blatant radical the Democrats have ever nominated,” Paxton said in his victory speech. “He’s also running a vegan campaign, whatever that is. He goes by a few names you’ve all heard of. Some people know him as Tofu Talarico. Some people call him Six-Gender Jimmy. I’ve even heard some people call him James Talarico. And others just refer to him as Low-T Talarico.”
The proliferation of derogatory nicknames was not an entirely successful Trumpian flourish. (The Talarico campaign, which was already a fundraising campaign, immediately began selling “I’m a Talarico” T-shirts). But Paxton’s attacks also appear to originate from the manosphere and incel culture, overlapping Internet communities obsessed with their own unscientific theories of sex, gender, hormones, and diet.
Paxton’s first ad of the general election continued in the same bro-coded manner, presenting Tallarico as out of step with Texan values and lacking testosterone: the spot ends with him declaring the Democrat “too low-T for Texas.” Meanwhile, Trump adviser Stephen Miller went a step further, posting to X on Wednesday that “Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender Senate candidate.”
Trump, for his part, has claimed that Tallarico “is a vegetarian in Texas, and you can’t get elected as a vegetarian in Texas.”
While there is no public information about her actual hormone levels, Talarico is neither transgender nor vegan. The latter claim apparently stems from comments he made while running for reelection to the Texas House of Representatives in 2022. At a fundraiser for the Texas Humane Legislation Network that year, he spoke about the need to reduce meat consumption to combat climate change and announced that his campaign was purchasing only vegan food products for its events. Tallarico himself did not claim to be a vegetarian, he has since denied that he is a vegetarian, and has eaten meat and dairy during the campaign. At a campaign stop at an Austin taco joint in early May, Tallarico ordered two potato, egg, and cheese tacos — a perfectly legitimate taco order that doesn’t even have to be vegan.
The fixation on eating meat and the need to maximize testosterone is typical of a piece like a male-dominated podcast joe rogan experience As well as toxic social media spaces where men allegedly denigrate vulnerable men as “sleep boys.” But many of these notions have found validation at the highest levels of the Trump administration—notably in the messaging and policy of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose “Make America Healthy Again” embraces all manner of medical pseudoscience.
For example, Kennedy warns about low testosterone in men. He is misreading the issue somewhat, because it is true that research shows that testosterone levels are falling, but for most men they are not in the clinically “low” range. He has also been staunch about encouraging Americans to eat more meat to get their daily protein, organizing photo-ops at barbecue and burger restaurants. (Ironically, whole soy foods like tofu are a rich source of protein, containing all the essential amino acids for human nutrition.)
That Republicans are now weaponizing these concepts against Tallarico shows that male chauvinism has seeped into the national consciousness. Yet it’s not clear that any Texan will be particularly impressed by the unacceptably campy portrayal of the former teacher and Presbyterian seminarian. Furthermore, while “vegan” and “low-T” may be common insults in some online hot spots, small Internet feuds are not necessarily meant to translate into a statewide contest that will be decided by some 19 million eligible voters.
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