Sarah Stogner, the Republican district attorney for Loving, Reeves and Ward counties, located west of Odessa, has opened a criminal investigation into pamphlets that were mailed recently to voters across the state purporting to have come from or be connected to the Transgender Education Network of Texas, or TENT, and marked as a resource guide for LGBTQ+ youth, according to reports by The Texas Tribune.
Stogner said that while her office is investigating as a potential forgery, she added that the scope of the investigation could expand depending on what information is uncovered.
Forgery, as the Texas Tribune notes, is a state jail felony under Texas law.
The pamphlets were labeled as having come from “The Texas Transgender Student Union,” which was actually created just recently in Wyoming as a limited liability company, and the return address on the mailer was a Houston-area post office box.
The pamphlets were an obvious effort to continue the right-wing’s scare campaigning targeting the transgender community ahead of the 2026 midterms. President Donald Trump has claimed that parents are sending their sons to school in the mornings and then picking them up as daughters in the afternoon because teachers and other school officials are “forcibly transitioning” the children at school.
And Democrat James Talarico’s support for transgender people and the rest of the LGBTQ+ community has been a constant source of attacks from the campaign of Republican Ken Paxton in the race to replace John Cornyn in the U.S. Senate. Paxton’s campaign has even tried to attack Talarico — or as they call him, “TalaFreako” — by claiming he is, himself, transgender.
While the pamplets, which were addressed to the students in the households and offered suggestions on how transgender teens could escape unsupportive families, repeatedly referenced TENT, which has categorically denied having to do with the pamplets.
A TENT spokesperson said in an email that the “messages were deliberately distributed in a manner calculated to cause maximum harm to TENT and to create confusion and strife among the Texas electorate.”
Stogner’s investigation comes after state Rep. Jeff Leach, a Republican from Plano, twice sent letters asking Paxton, the state’s attorney general, to investigate the pamphlets. Leach originally asked Paxton’s office to investigate possible violations of state law regarding student-organized groups and the materials taught in public school. But in his second letter Leach asked Paxton to find out who actually sent the pamphlets.
Stogner told the Texas Tribune she launched her investigation into the pamphlets and their source because her own constituents are angry and concerned about the chance their children might be “exposed” to the material included in the pamphlets. She also suggested that if the pamphlets were sent to try and motivate conservative voters to the polls, then “the effort was self-defeating.”
Stogner told Texas Tribune, “If we were actually worried about kids and their safety, no one would be sending propaganda to spread that message further on television ads, in text messages, in written whatever. If we are truly trying to protect children, we’d be focusing on how to put pedophiles in jail.”
— Tammye Nash