The Jesus Of James Talarico
Or, the political wedding of abortion rights and gender identity
Before James Talarico’s campaign for a US Senate seat in Texas goes any further, I want to acknowledge the Christian message that he brings as a Democratic hopeful. Talarico’s Christ is not a unique source of epistemic meaning to him, but one of many ideas borrowed indifferently from a menu of faith options.
James Talarico said in 2019 that “prophetic voices like Jesus” — though not exactly Jesus — “have helped me reckon with my own whiteness, my own masculinity, my own certainty, my own ego. It’s a never-ending process, and it’s a painful process.” Apparently Talarico considers
Masculinity and whiteness are sins. White men have to feel pain for their sins. The word for this religious remixing, coined by Wendy Doniger and Claude Lévi-Strauss, is bricolage. Humans form pastiches of beliefs using materials found in the cultural conversations all around them. Americans have access to a global free market of spiritual ideas.
The result is chaos. In the absence of official sanction, this explosive spiritual energy produces a spectacular diversity of religious opinion. Americans choose their beliefs from a la carte menus now. Blending and hybridity are assigned special creative power in the most liberal spiritual marketplaces, such as Los Angeles.
“God is nonbinary”, Talarico has said. This is not the influence of the Tao or Neo-Platonism or the alchemists. James Talarico has a soteriology (theory of salvation) that centers Queer Theory: save the queer, save Texas. Queer theology is libertine where postmodernism is merely liberal.
Talarico’s eschatology — his story of doomsday — imagines the impact of every issue on queer intersectionality: celebrate the queer, elevate Texas. This is a substitute civic religion that embraces abortion and pediatric sex changes as articles of faith.
Here we must recall the ‘literal genocide’ of being excluded from bathrooms and sports teams and locker rooms that transgender people must fight every day with lawsuits and cancel mobs. It is an article of transgender faith that transphobia kills, which in turn justifies every demand made on society. Give us the sports and spaces, or else the uterus is doomed.
Talarico is here to save the uterus. “Every one of our neighbors with a uterus became the property of the state” when the United States Supreme Court overruled Roe v Wade, Talarico has said. This is metonymy, the use of a part of something to speak of the whole thing, for example when referring to ships as ‘sails’. Women, objectified as their uteruses, became literal slaves in Egypt due to the Dobbs decision, according to James Talarico.
It would be a standard liberal metaphor if not for the glaring fact that Talarico cannot say ‘women’, because that would be transphobic. The absurd verbal construction “neighbors with a uterus” further tortures the political framing in which millions of people are ‘neighbors’. A bad metaphor is twisted into something even worse: pure pandering to a demanding minority.
“Before we go any further, I want to acknowledge that our trans community needs abortion care, too.” Conservative voters in Texas understand this message is not for them. This message is for people who believe in magic. Defending the trans Texans is how Talarico will defend Texas from the nasty transphobias and save abortion for uterus-equipped Texans. His Jesus is a queer feminist suffering for your sins. He just needs the gun-hugging white dudes to feel the pain they/them feel on the cross.
Talarico is hardly alone among Democrats. These beliefs are now common in high level Democratic circles. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s Office of LGBTQIA2S+ Advancement is holding a third annual “Trans Period Pride” event with the state chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) on 17 June. Readers can click here to register for the event.
“Join Mass NOW for the third annual Trans Period Pride Consciousness Raising! Learn about trans experiences with menstruation from the MA Trans Political Coalition and participate in a group discussion to connect and share. This event is free to attend, and members of the Trans community and their allies are welcome,” the event registry states.
The Office of LGBTQIA2S+ Advancement received nearly $1 million in taxpayer funding for 2026. Boston Public Library is reportedly also hosting as many as 19 drag queen story time events for children during Pride Month. Tim Walz was not an outlier from his party when he pushed for tampons in the male restrooms of Minnesota public schools. He was the bleeding edge of transgender reproductive magic in American politics.
If girls can be boys, ‘born in the wrong bodies’ as it were, then it is also reasonable that some boys can menstruate and some boys can get pregnant. The term ‘trans boy’ or ‘trans man’ is a glamour, a manipulation of perceptions, as in the performance of an illusionist. The trans man can bleed and have babies. Ergo, trans men might reasonably need abortions. Talarico is being inclusive of women who say they are men in his defense of women.
‘Trans men’ at least have uteruses. They are not the limit of Talarico’s definitional ambitions, however. He is also inclusive of men in his definition of women. For while no man can reasonably be surgically altered to have a uterus connected — the results of past attempts were grisly — the uterus transplant, along with stem cell research, lends pseudoscientific hope for this utopian future to those who want to believe it is coming.
I have heard the testimony myself at progressive events. I have heard apostles of this strange creed, aping the prophetic tradition of civil rights, say that “trans sisters” of the future will need abortions one day, and on this basis it is incorrect and transphobic and exclusionary to say ‘No uterus, no opinion’ anymore. The reader will notice that this motto, once so familiar, has disappeared from the liberal lexicon. Men who claim to have periods did not like it.
James Talarico is not simply ‘inclusive’ of women who destroy their fertility with testosterone. He is being inclusive of men who might, one day, through scientific medical miracles yet to happen, receive a uterus — and then want an abortion, so that they can feel like real women. Texas is not truly free until men can be women who have abortions.
Transgender-identifying men do in fact frequently claim to have periods. Cross-sex hormones are known to cause changes to the body, including digestion, that serve as placebos for men desperate to believe they are transforming into women. Academics are keen to ‘emerge’ such voices in their scholarly research.
Talarico represents a postmodernist Christianity that believes in sex change magic and testifies from a public library pulpit. Aware of how he sounds, Talarico seemed to walk back his assignment of non-binary status to God in a CBS interview. “I was being intentionally provocative”, he said. Provoking Texas voters who do not recognize the Jesus of James Talarico to notice that his Christ is not like theirs seems suspect as political practice.
The Democratic Party set aside two candidates, both Black, to choose Talarico. Intentional provocation can lead to alienation. These potential political malpractices are only justified by the belief that history will vindicate them, which is to say that Democrats intend to use any political power they win at any level to impose their new civic religion by force.
Black Americans will simply have to agree that men can have periods and get pregnant, or else.
‘Save the trans kids’ is soteriology, a theory of salvation that appeals to white liberals like Talarico. Saving abortions for the trans kids is eschatology, a theoretical doomsday outcome that society must prevent through social upheaval. James Talarico expresses a version (bricolage) of the progressive 21st century ‘Christian’ Democrat.
He demotes Christ and denatures God in order to achieve spiritual equity in the cosmos. The forced marriage of abortion rights and transgender rights appeals to liberal women who vote for Democrats, but not the men that Democrats have lost.
I have no sectarian stance, but I doubt this magic woo act will work on Texas voters. I am however equally sure that the cult of the trans child, the trans uterus, and the trans period remains strong within the Democratic Party. In all likelihood, we are seeing the future of the Democratic Party male for at least one more cycle.
Democratic men have to protect women, but without saying the word ‘women’, or admitting they know what a woman is. It is a weird cult, so it makes them sound weird.