James Talarico, the Texas state representative now running as a Democrat against Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton for a U.S. Senate seat, has referred to women as "neighbors with a uterus" on more than one occasion, a phrase that strips half the population down to a body part in the name of progressive piety.
The label surfaced in remarks Talarico made lamenting the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. In one statement, he declared that "every one of our neighbors with a uterus became property of the state." In another clip, he argued that "neighbors with a uterus" should be able to "control their own body."
The language is not an isolated slip. It fits a pattern of statements from Talarico that raise serious questions about whether this candidate, now asking Texas voters to send him to Washington, can speak plainly about basic biological and cultural realities. Breitbart first reported on the remarks and compiled several of Talarico's most revealing public statements.
During a Texas House committee debate in 2021, Talarico offered a claim that would puzzle most biology professors, and most Texans with common sense. He told a fellow lawmaker:
"Modern science obviously recognizes that there are more than two biological sexes, in fact, there are six, which, honestly, Representative Hefner, surprised me, too. The point is that biologically speaking, scientifically speaking, sex is a spectrum and oftentimes it can be very ambiguous."
"Obviously" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. The claim that there are six biological sexes is not mainstream science. It is activist jargon dressed up in a lab coat. Talarico presented it as settled fact on the floor of a state legislature, without citation, without challenge, and without apparent embarrassment.
This is the same candidate who now wants to represent a state where ranchers, roughnecks, and working families tend to know the difference between a bull and a heifer without consulting a gender studies syllabus.
Talarico's record extends beyond gender ideology. He also weighed in on a Texas bill that would have required the display of the Ten Commandments in public schools, and he did so with the confidence of a seminary dean, if not the rigor of one.
"This bill, to me, is not only unconstitutional, it's not only un-American; I think it is also deeply un-Christian. It does violence to both Christianity and Judaism. There are way more than Ten Commandments in the Jewish tradition, 613 mitzvot, and Christianity has its own rich diversity of interpretations. This bill picks and chooses one version, promotes it in public schools, and ignores the beautiful diversity of both faiths. It has no historical basis in American history as a mandate for public education. And let's talk about the Founding Fathers, I am a lot more religious than some of our Founding Fathers."
Leave aside the constitutional argument, which is at least a legitimate debate. The claim that the Ten Commandments have "no historical basis in American history as a mandate for public education" would come as news to the generations of American schoolchildren who grew up seeing them posted in courthouses and classrooms across the country. And the assertion that Talarico is "a lot more religious than some of our Founding Fathers" is the kind of boast that usually ages poorly.
Talarico's willingness to lecture Texans on theology while simultaneously refusing to call women "women" reveals a particular kind of progressive confidence, one that is certain about everything except the things most people consider obvious.
Talarico is not the only Texas Democrat generating controversy this cycle. Another Texas Democrat, Maureen Galindo, drew bipartisan condemnation for vowing to jail "American Zionists" at an ICE detention center, a remark so inflammatory that members of her own party distanced themselves.
The "neighbors with a uterus" formulation belongs to a broader trend in progressive politics: the replacement of clear, universally understood language with ideological euphemisms that confuse voters and alienate the very people Democrats claim to champion. Women are not a collection of organs. They are mothers, daughters, wives, workers, voters, and they tend to notice when a politician can't bring himself to say the word.
Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and Democratic insider, has warned his own party about exactly this kind of drift. As Emanuel himself has argued, Democrats have "lost the plot" on cultural issues, and candidates like Talarico keep proving him right.
The broader Democratic coalition is already under strain. Incumbents across the party face well-funded primary challengers as internal tensions over ideology, messaging, and electability intensify. Talarico's brand of progressive orthodoxy may play well in Austin faculty lounges. Whether it plays in Lubbock, Amarillo, or the Rio Grande Valley is another question entirely.
Talarico's opponent, Ken Paxton, is the sitting Republican attorney general of Texas, a figure who carries his own political baggage but who has never, to anyone's knowledge, struggled to use the word "women" in a sentence.
The contrast is instructive. Paxton has built his political identity on fighting federal overreach and defending Texas law. Talarico has built his on telling Texans that sex is a spectrum, that the Ten Commandments are un-Christian, and that women are best described by their reproductive organs.
Talarico has acknowledged that some of his past remarks "missed the mark," but acknowledgment is not the same as correction. The statements remain on the record. The worldview that produced them remains intact. And the Senate race is just getting started.
Texas voters will have a clear choice. One candidate talks like a Texan. The other talks like a graduate seminar that went off the rails.
Democrats have spent years insisting they are the party of women. But when their candidates cannot even say the word, when "woman" becomes "neighbor with a uterus" and biological sex becomes a six-category spectrum, voters are entitled to wonder whom, exactly, the party is fighting for.
The language a politician uses tells you what he believes. And what Talarico believes, based on his own words, is that plain speech about men and women is too dangerous for polite Democratic company.
If you can't say "women" out loud, you probably shouldn't ask them for their votes.
