For a few years, gymnastics icon Simone Biles has occasionally strapped on the armor of a woke culture warrior. In 2020, she blasted critics of an UberEats commercial where she and the outrageously effeminate Jonathan Van Ness each flipped around on a gymnastics mat while wearing identical apparel. In 2021, she informed the world that she supported legal abortion. In recent days, Biles attacked conservative activist Riley Gaines, who had recently written a post on X criticizing a Minnesota high school that allowed a male student to pitch for its team en route to a state softball championship. Biles wrote:
After a few days of criticism, Biles released a PR-scented follow-up statement, offering Gaines a modest apology and insisting that she was only objecting to Gaines’ supposed attacks against high school athletes. She wrote, in part, “these are sensitive, complicated issues that I truly don’t have the answers or solutions to, but I believe it starts with empathy and respect.”
Ah, well, there’s the problem that led the summer Olympian to commit the winter Olympian’s error of getting out over her skis. Biles tried to start an empathy competition with Gaines, only to reveal how much of that virtue she lacks.
When it comes to female athletes struggling with the intrusion of male competitors in their space, Biles had every reason to understand their plight instantly. She worked tirelessly to achieve her success. She should be able to put herself in the cleats of some high school girls who labored diligently themselves, only to have victory snatched away from them by the man-hands of a pitcher who has inarguable biological advantages, advantages Biles herself acknowledged in her post insulting Gaines’ physique.
Likewise, as a victim of Larry Nassar, Biles knows firsthand the horrors of what happens when predatory men are allowed access to vulnerable young women. Biles laments that U.S. Gymnastics didn’t protect her from Nassar. Why is she so hostile to Gaines, who is dedicating her life to keep vulnerable girls safe from any man who calls himself a woman having the freedom to prowl around their locker rooms naked?
Biles displayed the same empathy deficiency with her comments on abortion when she wrote “for everyone gonna say ‘just put it up for adoption’ it’s not that easy & coming from someone who was in the foster care system TRUST me foster care system is broken & it’s TOUGH especially on the kids & young adults who age out & adoption is expensive.”
Conceived in the womb of an unwed, drug-addicted criminal, Biles was the platonic ideal of the kind of pregnancy progressives say should be aborted. She was given the gift of life, but effectively said that anyone else born in similar circumstances might well be better off killed in the womb. Monstrous? Yes. Empathetic? Hardly.
Wokeness has always fancied itself a movement rooted in empathy. It’s an ideology whose adherents are always quick to tell you how much compassion they have for others, in particular the oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable. But in reality, it’s a worldview rooted in a strange mixture of self-hatred and self-interest. Its adherents believe the way to become righteous is to disavow the privilege (read: blessings) you have, but not until you’ve already benefited from them.
We see this in Biles, who has repeatedly shown that her initial instinct when confronted with children sharing the vulnerabilities she once knew is to ultimately tell them “sux 2 b u.” We saw it in another woke female athlete, Megan Rapinoe, who decried the bigotry of excluding transwomen (read: men) from women’s soccer just in time for her retirement from women’s soccer. We see this in King Charles reading a masochistic land acknowledgment in Canada after it’s ever-so-regrettably too late to give the Algonquin’s back their “unceded territory.” In all of this, the woke are declaring, “we don’t deserve our wealth, our success, our accomplishments. We climbed a ladder of injustice to reach these things. So now, having already reached the top, time to burn the ladder.”
Concerning transgendering, an inflexible clause of the woke creed is that transwomen are women. On account of this, I expect Simone Biles to face the ire of the woke purists for suggesting that the trans athlete issue is “complicated” and for floating the possibility that trans athletes should have their own category. Should she end up in their jaws, she would benefit from reconsidering whether trying to win the favor of people who would have celebrated her death had she been born to a mother who aborted her or had she excelled in a sport more easily male-invaded than women’s gymnastics.
If wokeness hasn’t killed whatever seeds of empathy she has left, now would be a good time to water them by learning from someone like Riley Gaines.