Texas Senate Race Pits Abortion Rights Against The Bogeyman Of Boys In Girls Sports

WICHITA FALLS, Texas — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and his Democratic challenger, Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), are pitching themselves to voters as defenders of women in the final weeks of a Senate race that provides one of the few last-dash hopes Democrats have to retain control of the U.S. Senate.

The difference? A threat that Allred is discussing, to the safety and health of women living under Texas’ abortion ban, is very real, with multiple Texas women speaking out about their recent terrible experiences.

A threat that Cruz is hyping — of out transgender athletes playing in girls sports — is rare enough that Cruz generally avoids pointing to examples of it happening in Texas, where state lawmakers have already enacted laws to stamp it out.

How Texan voters interpret these two threats could determine control of the U.S. Senate. With Republicans all but certain to pick up one seat this election cycle, Democrats need to win in Texas, Florida or Montana to have a hope of holding Congress’ upper chamber. Polls have shown Cruz with a small but consistent lead over Allred, though a leaked Republican polling memo showed him up by only 1 percentage point earlier this week.

Ahead of a Tuesday evening debate, Cruz launched a new TV ad accusing Allred, a former NFL linebacker, of wanting to let boys play in girls sports — the latest campaign commercial in a series that included one spot, from a group backing Cruz, showing an Allred look-alike in a football uniform tackling a girl . It’s the third ad released in the past month that’s focused on transgender issues in a bid to boost Cruz, as many as his campaign has devoted to any other topic.

In other Senate races, Republicans are deploying the same strategy, airing ads warning of boys playing girls sports in Montana, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Allred countered during Tuesday evening’s debate by suggesting Cruz is only trying to distract from Texas’ abortion ban.

“What he wants you thinking about is kids in bathrooms so you’re not thinking about women in hospitals,” Allred said. “We have Texas women being turned away from hospitals, bleeding out in their cars, in waiting rooms, being found by their husbands.”

Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), left, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) participate in a U.S. Senate debate, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024, in Dallas.

After conservative Supreme Court justices, whom Cruz supported, overturned the federal right to abortion in 2022, Texas and many other Republican-led states banned the procedure, prompting doctors to refuse to perform abortions even when a mother’s health is at stake. Abortion has been a major political drag for Republicans ever since, contributing to an underwhelming performance in the 2022 midterm elections and various special elections, as Democrats maintain a massive advantage among female voters.

“All of a sudden, the protector of women and girls is going to be Sen. Cruz? Who thinks it’s perfectly reasonable that if a girl is raped by a relative of hers, a victim of incest, that she should be forced to carry that child to term and give birth to it?” Allred said on Tuesday. “You’re going to set yourself up as the protector of women and girls? It’s laughable.”

Hours before this week’s debate, the Allred campaign staged a press conference with three women who said they couldn’t get abortions even when complications to their wanted pregnancies posed significant risks to their health.

“We learned our baby would never survive, and the risks to my health and a future pregnancy were growing, and the Texas abortion ban made a terribly difficult decision impossible to make in my home state,” said Kate Cox, who wound up traveling out of state for an abortion that she said saved her ability to get pregnant again.

“I’m pregnant today because I had access to abortion care. I wouldn’t be pregnant today if that wasn’t the case,” she said.

Both abortion access and opposition to transgender rights have emerged as top election issues in Texas and across the country, with Donald Trump’s Republican presidential campaign this month releasing an ad claiming that his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, supports “sex change” operations for federal prisoners. (The Federal Bureau of Prisons recently said that a total of two federal inmates have undergone gender-affirming surgeries, after taking the government to court.)

Harris noted in a Fox News interview Wednesday that federal inmates had also received gender-affirming care during Trump’s 2017-2021 presidency because federal law requires it. She dismissed Trump’s ad attacks as focused on a topic with little relevance to America.

“He has spent $20 million on those ads ... on an issue that, as it relates to the biggest issues that affect the American people, is really quite remote,” Harris told Fox News’ Bret Baier.

As Cox and the women who stood with her Tuesday can attest, abortion access may be a more tangible policy question for most people than gender-affirming surgery for federal inmates or the rare phenomenon of transgender girls competing on sports teams that match their gender identity.

In a brief interview after a rally in Wichita Falls, HuffPost asked Cruz if he knew of any examples of transgender athletes competing in Texas. Cruz didn’t cite any specific cases.

“There have been multiple examples, but this issue illustrates just how far out of the mainstream Colin Allred is,” Cruz told HuffPost. “Overwhelming majority of Texans, overwhelming majority of Americans don’t believe boys should compete in girls sports, don’t believe men should compete against women’s sports.”

Cruz claimed two men participated in the 2024 Summer Olympics as women, something that the International Olympic Committee has flatly said is untrue .

Nationally, there have been just a few dozen instances of out transgender athletes , whether male or female, competing in college sports over the past decade, and even fewer instances of them displacing cisgender athletes on teams or in competitions.

A Cruz campaign spokesperson noted that last year in Dallas, a transgender girl won in the under-14 girls category of an Irish dancing competition, prompting a backlash from some parents. (The competition wasn’t affiliated with Texas public schools, however, so it was beyond the reach of a state policy restricting trans athletes’ participation on teams that don’t correspond to the gender on their birth certificate.) And in 2022, The Texas Tribune interviewed a 16-year-old trans girl who said Texas law prevented her from participating in track meets.

Last month, a Cruz campaign flyer featured an image of Mack Beggs, a trans man and former Texas high school wrestler who wanted to wrestle against boys in the 2010s but was required by the state to wrestle in the girls division because Beggs wasn’t assigned male at birth. In other words, Beggs’ case was not exactly the “boys in girls sports” situation Cruz bemoans in his campaign.

During his Wichita Falls rally, Cruz supporters booed when he told them Allred had “vocally supported having boys compete in girls sports.” Several attendees told HuffPost it was their top issue after border security and the economy.

Terrie Cribbs, a retiree who lives in Wichita Falls, said she has been increasingly aware of transgender girls participating in girls sports over the past couple of years.

“It’s just getting worse and worse as people are getting crazier and crazier,” Cribbs said, adding that she was not aware of any such cases in Texas. “We got common sense.”

Allred has said in TV ads and during Tuesday night’s debate that he doesn’t support boys in girls sports, as Cruz has stated.

“I don’t support these ridiculous things that he’s talking about,” Allred said at the event, without saying specifically that he’s against allowing transgender girls to participate in girls sports. Allred’s comments have drawn some fire from transgender activists, who have questioned his adoption of Cruz’s framing of the issue .

Cruz has pointed to Allred’s vote in 2021 for the Equality Act, a bill that would have prohibited discrimination based on gender, and last year against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which would cut federal funding to colleges and universities that allow “individuals of the male sex” to take roster spots on women’s teams.

Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas), speaking on Allred’s behalf after the debate, told reporters that those votes were insignificant.

“Sen. Cruz referred a lot to the voting record, and I took the same votes at the same time and I don’t know half the things he was talking about,” Fletcher said. “That happens a whole lot. You see in Congress all the time these votes that are kind of ‘gotcha votes.’ And then you see the campaigns and the candidates come out and talk about how there was one sentence in some bill that was about something else and that shows that they voted on something.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in 2021 and 2023 signed bills requiring student athletes in Texas public schools to compete on teams corresponding to their biological sex. These established in Texas essentially the same protections envisioned by the bill Allred voted against, which was passed by the U.S. House, ignored by the Senate and never expected to become law.

When he was asked during the debate about whether he supported exceptions to abortion bans for cases of rape and incest, Cruz avoided answering directly, but said it was fitting that the Supreme Court had thrown out the federal right to abortion and allowed states like Texas to enact their bans — basically the same setup he’s suggesting is inadequate for girls sports.

“I agree with the United States Supreme Court that under our Constitution, the way we resolve questions like that, questions on which we have real and genuine disagreements, is at the ballot box, is voting,” Cruz said. “And that’s why the state of the law now is that the Legislature in Austin sets the laws in Texas. You wouldn’t expect Texas’ laws to be the same as California. You wouldn’t expect Alabama to be the same as New York.”