James Talarico, the Democratic US Senate nominee in Texas, went on Fox News and said he opposes trans girls competing in girls' sports "if it risks safety or fairness." Five years ago, as a state representative, he voted against exactly this kind of restriction, called it government policing of "people's private parts," compared the justifications to those used to bar Black athletes from professional sport, and said plainly: "Some things are more important than perfectly fair competition in sports." Now he is on Fox News telling a largely conservative audience that he has come around.

I have watched this pattern play out enough times to recognise it immediately. It is not a policy evolution. It is a political calculation, and a bad one.

What the word "if" is actually doing

Let's spend a moment with that sentence, because the "if" is doing a great deal of work. "I will oppose trans athletes playing in girls' sports if it risks safety or fairness." Read quickly, it sounds like a proportionate, case-by-case position. Read carefully, it is a trap door. Who decides whether safety or fairness is at risk? On what evidence? Against what standard? And crucially: does any cis girl ever have to demonstrate that her participation does not risk fairness before she is allowed to take the field?

Of course not. The question is not asked of cis girls because the answer is assumed. When you apply the "if" only to trans girls, you have already answered the question. You have decided, before any individual child has shown up to any training session, that their presence requires justification that nobody else's does. The conditional phrasing does not protect trans girls from unfair exclusion. It formalises unfair exclusion in softer language.

This is how the rhetoric of "safety and fairness" functions in practice. It sounds neutral. It sounds like common sense. It is neither. It places the entire burden of proof on the child who already faces the most barriers, and it builds that burden into the structure of participation itself. A trans girl does not get to just play sport. She gets to play sport if she can prove she deserves to.

The record he is running away from

The Texas Tribune's reporting makes clear that Talarico's previous position was not a casual remark. He voted against Republican restrictions on trans student-athletes in the state legislature. He called those restrictions harmful. He drew a comparison to the history of racial segregation in sport that was not glib: it was historically informed and morally serious. He said, on record, that some things matter more than competitive purity.

Now, on Fox News, he is offering a revised account of those votes: he opposed the bills because they were "overly broad," not because of the underlying principle. He supported amendments that would have localised decision-making. He was for something like restrictions, just not those particular ones.

That is not a clarification of his position. It is a rewrite of his history. And it is the kind of rewrite that the people who remembered his original position notice immediately, while the people he is hoping to win over do not believe for a second.

Ken Paxton, his Republican opponent, said as much within hours: Talarico voted against the bills, called them a far-right conspiracy theory, and now says he was always basically in favour of the underlying principle. "This is just the latest episode in James Talarico's long saga of lies and flip-flops," Paxton posted. Whether or not you find Paxton's framing fair, his political point lands: the reversal does not neutralise the attack. It confirms it.

The part that hurt most to read

Alongside the sports reversal, Talarico also walked back his 2021 statement that there are six genders. Asked directly, he said: "No. I missed the mark on some of my past statements." He framed intersex people as a "small percentage of people with genetic abnormalities."

I want to stay with that word: abnormalities. Intersex people are not abnormal. Gender diversity is not abnormal. These are variations in human biology and identity that have existed across every culture and every period of recorded history. Describing intersex people as genetically abnormal, in order to reassure a conservative television audience that you really do believe there are only two sexes, is not a correction of an imprecise earlier statement. It is something more troubling than that. It is using real human beings as a prop in an exercise of political distancing.

Brad Pritchett, CEO of Equality Texas, said his organisation expected better. "When did people of moral standing decide to use Texas children as a political football?" he asked. "Fairness in school sports must include trans kids. Trans kids deserve the opportunity to play sports as much as their peers." That is the correct answer. It is also, notably, what James Talarico used to believe.

Why the calculation still fails

I understand the argument being made here. Texas has not elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994. Talarico is running against an opponent who has made trans people a centrepiece of his campaign. The theory is that if you move towards your opponent on the issue they are using against you, you neutralise the attack and free up space to make your economic argument.

The evidence does not support this theory. It has been tested in enough races across the US to have a result, and the result is consistent: candidates who abandon trans people in pursuit of centrist respectability do not win the voters they were hoping for, and they lose the coalition that gave them a reason to run. The attack ads do not stop. They intensify, because now the attacks have footage of the candidate agreeing with the premise. And the grassroots energy that might have turned out for someone with a principled, distinctive position goes quiet.

More than that: it causes real harm to real children. Somewhere in Texas right now, there is a trans girl who knew that James Talarico had voted for her. Who had seen his record and felt, perhaps for the first time in her experience of politics, that someone at that level had her in mind. That trust is now gone. That is not an abstraction. That is a child.

What moral courage actually looks like in Texas

Talarico has built his campaign around the language of Christian faith and the instruction to "love thy neighbour." He has argued that the culture wars are a distraction manufactured to divide ordinary people from each other. He has said the real minority destroying America is the billionaires, not the communities being scapegoated by conservative media.

That is a compelling argument. It was a compelling argument when he made it. But it requires consistency to hold together. You cannot argue that trans people are being used as a smokescreen by powerful interests, and then on Fox News agree to let trans girls be screened out of sport. You cannot say the culture wars are manufactured to divide us, and then pick up the culture-war tool when the polls look difficult. The argument dismantles itself.

There is a version of James Talarico who goes on Fox News and says: I voted against those bills because trans kids deserve to play sport, I stand by that, and I think most Texans understand that bullying children is not a family value. That is harder. It might not work. But it is honest, and it is the kind of moral clarity that occasionally surprises people into voting differently than expected. The version that appeared on Fox News this week will not surprise anyone. It will only disappoint the people who were already with him.

Trans kids in Texas needed a senator who would fight for them. They needed that before this reversal, and they need it more now. What they got instead was a candidate who decided they were too expensive to defend. The votes he was hoping to gain will not arrive. The trust he gave up is gone.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and founder of GenderGP. She writes about trans health, rights, and the lives of trans people and their families.