A week before early voting started in Texas, people across the state got a text: “New school year? Here’s your complete guide on bathrooms and beyond for trans kids at school.”

Two days later, another: “Questions about gender-affirming care in Texas? Start here. You can get the care you need.”

Then the brochures arrived, addressed to the “students” of households from San Antonio to the Panhandle.

All of it looked like it came from trans advocates. None of it did, according to the people it was dressed up as. With Election Day on November 3, here’s what we know, what we don’t, and why it matters.

What landed, and who it pretended to be

The reporting here comes mainly from The Texas Newsroom, published by Texas Public Radio on October 27.

  • The texts came from unknown numbers with a 432 (West Texas) area code and linked to real pages from the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT), including a “Back to School Toolkit.” They reached Texans across the political spectrum.
  • The mailers were presented as a guide for transgender, nonbinary and questioning youth and urged readers to contact four LGBTQ+ organisations, TENT among them. They were sent under the name “Texas Transgender Student Union.”
  • That “union” was registered as an LLC in Wyoming the month before, and has no known social media presence, FOX 4 reports.

TENT said on October 13 that the texts were not “authored, authorized, approved, or distributed by TENT.” Every group named told The Texas Newsroom it wasn’t involved in creating, funding or authorising the mailer.

The paper trail so far

Nobody has publicly identified who paid. But the trail has a few markers:

  • The phone numbers trace to Peerless Network, a Chicago company that’s a subsidiary of Infobip. Infobip told reporters it was taking “precautionary measures” but wouldn’t name its customer.
  • The US Postal Service says an Illinois company, Three Z Printing, holds the bulk-mail permit used for the flyers.
  • TENT’s attorney, Mimi Marziani, sent Peerless and Infobip a cease-and-desist letter on October 14 and has asked a Travis County judge to compel an Infobip representative to testify. “Somebody spent a lot of money to smear our client TENT,” she said.

The investigation

Sarah Stogner, the Republican district attorney for Loving, Ward and Reeves counties, has opened a forgery investigation into the mailers. Forgery is a state jail felony in Texas. She isn’t investigating the texts, and her probe isn’t expected to conclude until after the election, The Texas Newsroom reports.

Stogner believes the mailers were meant to push voters toward candidates who may oppose the LGBTQ+ community, according to FOX 4, which also reports that Democratic and Republican lawmakers want to get to the bottom of who’s responsible. State Rep. Venton Jones said the legislature “might need to look at creating a new law to prevent something like this from happening again.”

Why might current law fall short? Austin campaign-law attorney Andrew Cates told The Texas Newsroom that Texas political advertising rules bar misrepresenting identities and hiding a message’s source, but because these messages don’t mention a candidate or an election, proving they were meant to influence one is hard.

The real damage is to real people

Whoever sent the messages, the backlash landed on the actual organisations.

TENT says it has received “an onslaught of hate and violent threats,” which grew after the mailers went out. It has hired attorneys, paid for added security and cancelled events in several cities. OutYouth, another group named in the mailers, temporarily closed its in-person programs for security; its telehealth and virtual programs are still running. “The safety of everyone at OutYouth comes first,” director Jaryn Holbrook Janeway said.

That’s the part worth sitting with. A message designed to make trans people look like a threat to kids didn’t need to be true to work. It just needed to land in mailboxes at the right moment, and the people who answered for it were the ones running youth programs.

What you can do

  • Don’t share photos of the mailers without context. It spreads the message the sender wanted out.
  • If you got one, keep it, envelope and all. Investigators and TENT’s lawyers are trying to trace the source.
  • Check resources at the source. If you or your kid need support, go directly to an organisation’s own website or verified accounts.
  • Vote with real information. Early voting is underway, and Election Day is November 3.

And if you’re able to, the organisations that had to cancel events and pay for security this month could use the support.

Sources