Talarico vows to ban gender surgery for kids, then takes cash from the group that provides it.

…(cont) Here's what the page says, as best as I can recall it. I've actually got two copies of this clipping — same words, same day, like it ran twice. Did it run twice? On a Wednesday in September, Mr. Talarico, running for the Senate out of Texas, was asked about transgender athletes playing girls' sports. The Hill ran that the next day, Thursday, September 10, same phrasing both times, apparently. The Washington Examiner, covering the same Wednesday, used different words for it — "has to be safe and fair" — and called it a reversal, since he'd spent years saying athletes should play on the team that matches who they are. I didn't call it a reversal. They did. Was it one? That's their headline, sitting right there next to his.

That word — the one from the quote — isn't one I hear much outside of a bank line, the kind where everyone's holding a slip of paper with a number on it, and nobody has to ask whose turn is next, because the number says so. That's the job it usually does. It tells you whose turn it is without anybody arguing about it.

Now — and I apologize, because I know I just left this — this week, not September, this week, Mr. Talarico held a fundraiser in Manhattan. The people who threw it back gender surgery and transition drugs for minors. That's their stated position, not mine. He held it. They threw it. That's as far as the page goes, and I'm not walking past the edge of it to tell you what it means, because past the edge is just me talking, and nobody pays me for that.

So is that word still doing the same job it was doing on the Wednesday in September? Does it mean the same thing in a gym in Texas as it means in a ballroom in Manhattan? I've got a dog on the porch who doesn't care what week it is, and that's one more opinion than I've got on this.

I was ready to let the whole page go back in the glovebox when something stopped me. The fundraiser wasn't thrown by strangers who found him on their own; the paper says he's the one who held it. So before I close this up — the Wednesday he used the word was in September. The fundraiser was this week, in Manhattan. Is that the same month? Because I only caught him using the word once, and I'd like to know what it still means three weeks later. Fairness.