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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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An interesting "false flag" in the transgender culture war: a mystery group is impersonating a transgender group and sending texts and flyers to the wrong people:

https://www.kxan.com/news/texas-politics/texans-receive-texts-impersonating-transgender-advocacy-group/

This week, some Texans reported receiving texts about “gender-affirming care in Texas” and a “complete guide on bathrooms and beyond for trans kids at school.” Those messages included links to the website of the Transgender Education Network of Texas, or TENT.

Questions about gender-affirming care in Texas? Start here. You can get the care you need: https://transtexas.org/resources

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/trans-student-mailers-hit-texas-210015782.html

This week, some Texans reported receiving texts about “gender-affirming care in Texas” and a “complete guide on bathrooms and beyond for trans kids at school.” Those messages included links to the website of the Transgender Education Network of Texas, or TENT.

"This was sent to my home. Addressed to the 'students' of our family from the 'Texas Transgender Student Union.' It coaches minors on what to do if their parents are not supportive of their 'trans' identity and walks them through getting emancipated," Gonzales posted.

As far as I can tell, of course, the transgender groups in question have no disagreement with the contents in these messages, but they have been sent to the wrong people. They want this content to stay on the down low and for parents not to know about it. As on twitter poster put it "The trans people wouldn’t be stupid enough to send this out right before midterms unless they thought you were trans" (emphasis added). The pages on the websites that the pamphlets and texts linked to have been taken down, though archive links show they had content on them previously: https://web.archive.org/web/20261005063417/https://transtexas.org/trans-texas-takeover-tour/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260807023304/https://transtexas.org/resources/ which is a very interesting thing to do for a group that presumably wants people to attend their tour and have access to some resources.

This does reinforce the idea that the trans project is both unpopular and/or secretly transing kids without their parents knowing, as they reacting with horror that parents are being exposed to their message.

This hiding behavior is certainly not standard among all groups. Most groups would be thrilled to get free publicity pointed to their website, even if the messages are coming from an anonymous benefactor (assuming it doesn't get them on a spam shitlist or something). Nevertheless, it does seem like democrat ideology mandates that they support the maximalist trans movement, and their solution is to distance from it.

the Transgender Education Network of Texas, or TENT

How legitimate was this group? Aka how were they received/perceived/reported on prior to this latest dust-up? Is the whole thing like "linking to the DSA's policy pages", or more "linking to a fake organization that parrots the discourse of (or is at least similar to) a real one"?

The pamphlet I got had a return address on it of a private house in a suburb of Houston republicans win by double digits- hardly where a real left wing advocacy group would be headquartered(which might be Houston proper, but certainly would not be this cookie cutter suburb).

My understanding from the writeup is that the pamphlet group and the website being linked to are separate orgs, with the pamphlet group being the "false flag".