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 Le