I've seen things down in the tunnels. A possum running a three-card monte game. A sewer grate that hums the national anthem when it rains. But I have never seen a man take a headcount of the sexes and come back with a different number every election cycle.

Here's the case file.

Exhibit A, 2021. Texas state Rep. James Talarico stands in a House Committee on Public Education hearing, fighting a bill to keep boys out of girls' sports, and announces, "Modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes. In fact, there are six." Around the same time, on the House floor, he goes further up the chain of command: "God is non-binary."

Six sexes and a non-binary God. Most lawmakers leave a session with a parking ticket. This one left with a new theology and a periodic table.

Exhibit B, May 2026. Talarico is now the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, and suddenly the math gets tight. On CBS he explains he was "being intentionally provocative." Translation: he was trolling, on the record, in a government building, with the gavel down.

Exhibit C, September 2026. On Fox News he says he "missed the mark." Then he does the count again, slowly, the way you recount change at a toll booth: "There are not six sexes. There are two."

Four sexes, gone. No funeral. No press release. Just a Senate race and a quiet audit.

I took the evidence to my source, Gus, a retired sewer rat who did 30 years in municipal accounting. Gus looked at the numbers for a long time.

"Six to two," Gus said. "That's not a correction. That's a stock split in reverse."

Exhibit D is where the case turns. Last week, on The New York Times podcast "The Daily," Talarico explained who was really responsible for the God-is-non-binary era. Not him. Republicans. "I was put in a position where I had to fight back against that extremism," he said. "It's not like I ran for the legislature to talk about these things."

Let the record show: a grown man was cornered by a girls' sports bill and forced, against his will, to discover four additional sexes. The Republicans held the microphone. They made him say "in fact." They practically wrote "non-binary" on his hand.

That's the new defense. Not "I was wrong." Not "I still believe it." It's "my opponents made me say something so strange that I now need my opponents to forgive me for it." It's the kid who breaks a lamp and blames the lamp for being there.

Sunday night, Libs of TikTok posted the greatest hits again, and the internet took the whole tour. It reads less like a voting record and more like the back of a seminary cereal box.

And here's the part that keeps an old tunnel investigator up at night. Election Day is November 3. If the count has dropped from six to two in five years, what is it by the swearing-in? One? Is there a version of this where Talarico arrives in the Senate, looks around the chamber, and announces that, scientifically speaking, everyone in Washington is a lobbyist?

Gus thinks he has already made his peace with it.

"He found four extra sexes for a hearing," Gus said, packing up his abacus. "Give him a Senate seat and he'll find a fifth branch of government."

I've closed a lot of cases down here. This one I'm leaving open. The count's still moving.

The Demorat is satire. Tunnel Tucker is a fictional character, and so is Gus. Quotes from real people are taken from their public statements, interviews, and reporting; everything else is made up for laughs.

The real story that inspired this