Simone Biles is an Olympic gold medalist in gymnastics, but she may also be a gold medalist in mental gymnastics. That or, perhaps, she is just a bit of a hypocrite.
On a random Friday, Biles decided to jump into the debate on transgender athletes in response to a post from former University of Kentucky swimmer Riley Gaines. Biles called Gaines “truly sick,” a “straight up sore loser,” and said “no one in sports is safe with you around.” Gaines’s crime is opposing biological boys in girls’ sports, where female athletes are injured by them, forced to change in locker rooms beside them, and lose out on roster spots and championships to them.
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Biles then went further, telling Gaines to “bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.” What Biles has in physical grace, she very clearly lacks in other forms of it.
It was a revealing outburst, for a variety of reasons. The main one is that Biles has in the past milked sympathy from sports media for talking about her youth, when she was bullied for looking too manly. Biles was content to bask in the glow of the body positivity then, only to turn around and accuse other women of looking too manly when it came time to get political.
Another notable takeaway was Biles arguing that “no one in sports is safe” from female athletes who want female athletes to only compete against biologically female athletes. Apparently, it is far safer, according to Biles, to let biological boys concuss girls in volleyball or rugby while letting them use girls’ locker rooms to change.
But the most notable and revealing part of all of this was Biles’s “apology.” Biles, or, more likely, whatever PR firm wrote the statement for her, offered a “follow-up” where she unconvincingly apologized for body-shaming Gaines and accusing her of being a threat to athletes. Gaines showed the grace Biles didn’t have and accepted the apology. All’s well that ends well.
Except that it’s not. Gaines was highlighting a Minnesota girls’ softball team that won the state championship thanks to a biologically male pitcher. That 17-year-old pitched all 35 innings of the team’s playoff run, giving up just two runs en route to a state championship. If any of those girls on the teams that lost decided to complain about this being unfair, Biles would probably call them “straight up sore losers” too.
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Biles’s rant against Gaines took the personal tone it did because people such as Biles have no other defense for this. Biles, a career athlete, knows better than anyone that men have biological physical advantages over women. No one is surprised when a 6-foot-1-inch biological man goes from the No. 462 men’s swimmer to the top-ranked women’s swimmer. Therefore, people like Biles have to accuse the biological women who lost to that biological man of looking too manly, after they had to share a locker room with that biological man prior to competing.
Biles is not sorry for her personal attacks. She is sorry that those are the only tools she has to defend letting biological boys take over girls’ sports just in time for her to retire.