A Republican district attorney in West Texas has opened a criminal investigation into pamphlets mailed to homes across Texas purporting to come from a transgender rights organization.
Sarah Stogner, district attorney for Loving, Reeves and Ward counties west of Odessa, told The Texas Tribune that her office is investigating the mailers as a potential forgery but said the scope could expand as new information comes in. Forgery is a state jail felony under Texas law.
Stogner said she felt the mailers — which were marketed as a resource guide for LGBTQ+ students from the Texas Transgender Student Union, a group recently formed in Wyoming — were an obvious bid to agitate voters ahead of the November midterm elections.
“If this ends up being legal, it is everything that is wrong with our current political climate,” Stogner said.
The origin of the mailers is currently unknown, Stogner said. The student union listed as the sender was formed as a limited liability company in Wyoming in September, records show. The group’s address on the mailer was listed as a Houston-area post office box.
The pamphlets were addressed to the “student” of households and included sections encouraging LGBTQ+ youth to seek help from several advocacy groups if their parents don’t support their gender identity.
The pamphlets make repeated references to the Transgender Education Network of Texas, sparking criticism that has included threats of violence, a lawyer for the organization said Thursday. TENT officials say the organization had nothing to do with the mailers and believe they were an attempt to influence the midterm elections and harm the group’s reputation.
“These messages were deliberately distributed in a manner calculated to cause maximum harm to TENT and to create confusion and strife among the Texas electorate,” a TENT spokesperson said in an email.
Mimi Marziani, one of TENT’s lawyers, said the pamphlet adopted the “look and feel” of TENT’s real materials but mixed resources with information the group does not support — including information about the legal process for minors to be recognized as an adult.
Stogner said her constituents are angry and concerned about their children being “exposed” to the material in the mailers. She also said if the pamphlets were sent to motivate conservatives to vote, the effort was self-defeating.
“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,” she said. “If we are truly trying to protect children, we’d be focusing on how to put pedophiles in jail.”
Stogner’s investigation follows two letters from state Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, that asked Attorney General Ken Paxton to investigate the origin of the mailers as well as a series of text messages that similarly referenced TENT.
While Leach’s first letter, spurred by the texts, asked Paxton to investigate potential violations of a state law related to student-organized groups and materials taught in public schools, his second letter asked to uncover the identity of the sender.
“Since sending that letter one week ago, I have received new information raising the possibility that the communications and associated toolkit may not originate from the group whose name it was sent under,” Leach wrote.
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.
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