May 9, 2024; Washington, DC; Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaking along side Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and other Republican Senators holding a press conference discussing a resolution that condemns any action by the Biden Administration to withhold or restrict weapons for Israel. Photo: Jack Gruber-USA TODAY
Republican Ted Cruz’s desperate search for trans targets in a hateful series of anti-trans attack ads directed at his Democratic opponent Colin Allred has landed the two-term Texas senator in hot water with the parents of two cisgender girls and their high school.
The teens appear in at least two fear-mongering ads attacking both the trans community and Allred, picturing them alongside former University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas and CeCé Telfer, a Jamaican-born sprinter and the first out trans woman to win an NCAA title.
Related:
Over a photo of the two teens at an Oregon high school track and field event, a narrator ominously intones, “Boys in girls’ sports.”
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A representative from the Beaverton School District demanded the ads be pulled “from any and all distribution platforms” in an email to the Cruz campaign shared with The Hill, noting that the two athletes pictured are minors.
“The family nor the school or school district ever gave permission for this photo to be used,” the representative wrote. “It is alarming that your campaign would have produced/distributed/promoted this ad with false information, especially with minor children involved.”
“The family nor the school or school district ever gave permission for this photo to be used,” he wrote.
The image originally appeared in an April report by Central Oregon Daily News about controversy centered on a transgender high school athlete in the state.
A Cruz campaign spokesperson responded by saying the photo “features a female athlete who spoke out against boys playing in girls’ sports after participating in a track meet where a biological male beat female athletes and impacted individual and team medal results” but didn’t address the campaign labeling the young women as “trans”boys.”
Cruz and his fellow MAGA Republicans are training their attention and dollars on the anti-trans messaging — and ignoring voters’ top priorities, including the economy and health care — despite the strategy’s overt failure in 2022, when the GOP failed to produce a red wave in the midterms with a massive ad campaign focused on the same trans tropes.
For his part, Democratic nominee Allred, who’s locked in a tight race with Cruz, has called out the senator’s anti-trans on-air blitz as a “disgusting, false attack, and another example of how Ted Cruz only wants to divide Texans.”
Cruz will “say anything to distract from his dangerous abortion ban that is putting women’s lives at risk, trying to raise the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare and fleeing to Cancun during a deadly winter storm,” Josh Stewart, an Allred spokesperson, said in a statement.
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