Small-Town Texas Candidate, kindly shut your mouth

You don’t give two shits about women’s sports

I’m currently staying at my parents’ place for Christmas. It’s in rural central Texas, where my mom grew up on a farm and was introduced to a delightfully nerdy young man from East Tennessee who took a pipeline drafting job over the phone right out of high school and made the drive some time in the 1980s.

But this isn’t about that. This is about Texas in general, or Texas politics in general, or, more specifically, the junk mail you get in rural central Texas in 2023.

Despite the framed portrait of Our Lady of Somewhere off to my right and the crucifix on the wall in front of me (I’m the spawn of Czech Catholic Texas and not Evangelical Texas), my parents accepted my female-to-male transition three years ago openly, lovingly, and wholeheartedly. Nonetheless, this is only the second time I’ve come back ever since (because while parents are one thing, extended family is another, and it’s still awkward and terrifying even though they were pretty much all great in the end.)

The other morning, I caught my mom furiously tearing up a local Republican’s promotional brochure that had come in the mail. “Protecting Women’s Sports,” it had shouted in the subtitle. And the red my mom saw was contagious.

Was I pissed about the words in isolation? Sure, in some nuanced way that would require another essay. But the problem here was that we were talking local politics. And that this is a rural…