On Tuesday, with Donald Trump’s endorsement and the backing of the MAGA faithful, scandal-ridden Texas attorney general Ken Paxton defeated incumbent US senator John Cornyn in a runoff primary to claim the Republican nomination for that seat.
He then quickly set about painting his general-election opponent, Democratic Texas state representative James Talarico, as insufficiently masculine.
“My opponent is the most extreme radical that Democrats have ever nominated,” Paxton said in his victory speech. “He’s even running a vegan campaign, whatever that is. He goes by a few names that you may all have 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 Talafreako. And others refer to him simply as Low-T Talarico.”
The spattering of derogatory nicknames was a not entirely successful Trumpian flourish. (The Talarico campaign, already a fundraising juggernaut, started selling “I’m a Talafreako” T-shirts right away). But Paxton’s attacks also seemed to emanate from the manosphere and incel culture, overlapping internet communities obsessed with their own unscientific theories of gender, sex, hormones, and diet.
Paxton’s first ad of the general election continued in that bro-coded vein, casting Talarico as both out of step with Texan values and lacking in testosterone: the spot ends by declaring the Democrat “too low-T for Texas.” Meanwhile, Trump adviser Stephen Miller went a step further, on Wednesday posting to X that “Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.”
Trump, for his part, has claimed that Talarico is “a vegan in Texas, and you can’t get elected as a vegan in Texas.”
While his actual hormone levels are not public knowledge, 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 talked about the need to reduce meat consumption—in part to combat climate change—and announced that his campaign was only buying vegan food products for its events. Talarico did not claim to be a vegan himself, has since denied that he is one, and has eaten meat and dairy on the campaign trail. At a campaign stop at Austin’s Taco Joint earlier in May, Talarico ordered two potato, egg, and cheese tacos—a totally legitimate taco order which also happens to not be vegan.
The fixation on the need to eat meat and max out testosterone is of a piece with male-dominated podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience as well as toxic social media spaces where men denigrate supposedly weaker males as “soy boys.” But many of these notions have found purchase at the highest levels of the Trump administration—particularly in the messaging and policy of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose “Make America Healthy Again” embraces all manner of medical pseudoscience.
Kennedy, for example, has sounded the alarm about low testosterone in men. He’s somewhat misstating the issue, because while it’s true that research shows testosterone levels declining, they are not in the clinically “low” range for the majority of males. He has also been fanatical about exhorting Americans to eat more meat in order to get their daily protein, staging photo-ops at barbecue and burger restaurants. (Ironically, whole soy foods such as tofu are a rich source of protein, containing all the essential amino acids for human nutrition.)
That Republicans are now weaponizing these concepts against Talarico suggests that the masculinist dogma has penetrated the national consciousness. Yet it’s far from clear that any given Texan will be particularly swayed by depictions of the former teacher and Presbyterian seminarian as unacceptably effete. What’s more, while “vegan” and “low-T” may be insults common within certain online hot spots, the argot of petty internet squabbles doesn’t necessarily translate to a statewide contest that will be decided by nearly 19 million eligible voters.