An Open Letter to Simone Biles

Dear Simone,

The year 1997 was pretty significant for women’s sports. For one thing, it’s the year you were born. For another, it’s the year they finally created the WNBA.

As a gawky 14-year-old aspiring basketball player, I remember hearing many men around me mock the development, shaking their heads and making disparaging remarks about what a joke it was because women “can’t even dunk.”

I mostly ignored the naysayers and watched in admiration as some of my athletic sheroes (Kate Starbird, Dawn Staley, Sheryl Swoopes, and others) actively blazed a trail of opportunity for the rest of us female ballers. I didn’t care back then what their salaries were or how many people attended their games. I cared that they were bold enough to take up space and say, “We deserve a place to play, and so do the thousands of little girls behind us who fall in love with the game.”

Until this past week, I viewed you in that same light. I propped you up as a great, inspirational role model for girls in sports.

But then you took to X and decided to use your massive influence to attack and bully Riley Gaines for her defense of women and girls. You were furious that Riley used her platform to name the injustice of a Minnesota high school girls’ softball team who “won” the state championship due to its trans-identified male pitcher who mysteriously managed to throw a shut-out en route to the state title. Riley said this was unfair. You unleashed the hounds on her.

“You’re truly sick,” you told her. Then you body shamed her and told her she looked like a man— without any sense of irony of your obvious ability to discern, at a glance, the obvious physical differences between the sexes. You called her a “sore loser” for being upset that a grown man beat her in her sport. And even now that the dust has settled and you’ve issued a vague “apology” (which lacked specificity and reads like a strategic PR damage control campaign) I’m still gravely disappointed in the way you treated her.

You say you believe that “competitive equity” and “inclusion” are both imperative in sport, but the truth is that equity is impossible when you include men in women’s sport. You have to pick. The inclusion negates the equity. Inclusion is not a good thing when it cancels fairness. It’s why Title IX even exists in the first place.

You say you want “empathy” and “respect” and that you oppose “singling out children for public scrutiny,” which sounds well and good until you realize that the people robbed of both empathy and respect in the context of the Minnesota softball championship are the teenage girls forced to compete against a post-pubescent boy on a very public playing field. Absence of public scrutiny is what allows this injustice to continue unchecked.

Since the inception of women’s sports, they’ve been under attack—mostly by men, but sadly, also by women who prop up the male bullies. I’ve somewhat snarkily referred to these women as “handmaidens” out of sheer frustration with their disloyalty to their sex. Your remarks this past week reeked of that same betrayal.

Let’s review the historical record, shall we?

In 1971-1972, only 294,000 American girls played high school sports, as compared to the 3.7 million of their male counterparts. The disparity continued into college, where 32,000 women participated in collegiate athletic programs as compared to the 170,000 men who played college sports during that time. Before Title IX was enacted in 1972, women’s athletic programs received only 2% of athletic budgets, and athletic scholarships for females were virtually non-existent. This is no small thing. Women like me paid for our college educations with athletic scholarships. For us, access to this funding is the difference between a high school diploma and a college degree.

I could write you paragraph upon paragraph about the crazy hurdles female athletes have had to surmount across the years just to show up and have a chance to compete. I could tell you about Babe Didrikson Zaharias, who faced intense public scrutiny for being a dominant female athlete. Despite doing her country proud by winning multiple gold medals at the Olympics, the media was still cruel to her, suggesting that she might actually be a man and printing asinine things like, “It would be much better if she and her ilk stayed at home, got themselves prettied up and waited for the phone to ring.

I could tell you about how men physically tried to push Kathrine Switzer off the course on account of being a woman when she tried to participate in the Boston Marathon.

I could tell you about women like Ann Gordon Bain, whose varsity basketball game was interrupted by the men’s team who decided their desire to use the court to practice superseded the women’s right to finish their actual game.

Historically, women and girls have been excluded from sport on account of our sex. That’s why sex-based protections like Title IX matter. Without them, men run roughshod over us. It’s always been this way. In the modern age, we see this male domination reinventing itself to bulldoze women in sports. Only this time, it’s a little craftier. The new male supremacy movement is called “transgenderism,” and rather than stepping up to defend females against the loss of the more than 900 titles and trophies men have already stolen from them, you’re throwing stones at the resistance.

Why? Have you been so ideologically captured that you genuinely believe you’re being kind by centering men in women’s sports? Have you actually been hoodwinked into believing that trans identified athletes are excluded from anything at all? I’ve said this at least a hundred times in the last few years, so I might as well repeat it here:

Unlike women, trans identified people have never been excluded from sports a day in their lives. They’re fully included in the same opportunities and tournaments accessible to everyone else of their sex. They don’t want a third category for trans athletes, as your tweet suggested. You think this hasn’t already been tried? World Aquatics tried this back in 2023 by creating an open category at the Swimming World Cup. They had to cancel it because no one registered for it. The trans crowd doesn’t want to work for their own spaces the way women had to; they want to appropriate women’s labor by transjacking our spaces and claiming them for themselves.

I myself suggested a third category back in 2016 when I was on the frontlines of this debate, and I was mystified to find my name in articles in “The Guardian” alongside the words “Jim Crow.” You don’t know this yet, but suggestions like ours are widely rejected as “transphobic”—a new spin on the “separate but equal” accommodations of the Civil Rights Era. You’re bending yourself into pretzels to be seen as “kind and inclusive,” but you’ll never win this battle with your intellectual honesty intact. You’ll have to become a gold medalist in mental gymnastics, too, if you intend to continue trying to appease this crowd.

No one should need to explain to you why men don’t belong in women’s sports. You explained this perfectly yourself a few years ago when you specifically tweeted, “Good thing guys don’t compete against girls, or he’d take all the gold medals.”

Well that’s exactly what’s happening. And instead of protesting, you’re lobbing verbal grenades at the women with enough courage to resist.

Simone, you’re the GOAT as a woman in your sport, but let’s imagine that Yang Hak-Seon or Jake Jarman woke up tomorrow and realized that, deep down, their truest selves were actually female selves. Let’s say they concluded that, in order to “live their truth” they needed to compete as women. How’s your vaulting score going to stack up against these guys? What are you going to do when they leave you in the dust and become the new GOATS of women’s gymnastics? Is this fair? Do you care about the implications for female athletes at all? Wouldn’t you want someone to speak up and defend you? Someone like Riley? Better yet, someone like you?

Identities don’t play sports; bodies play sports. And as you correctly identified back in 2017, male bodies are privileged bodies when it comes to athletic competition. Men have increased O2 capacity, greater musculature, increased bone size and length, etc. Male bodies and processes aren’t altered by monthly menstruation. The difference in testosterone levels between men and women are so vast that there is literally no overlap in the ranges. There’s a reason we have yet to see a trans identified female taking up space on the starting lineup of an NBA or MLB team. No amount of wishful thinking or synthetic hormones is going to magically bridge the gap between reality and the sex based advantages of the male sex when it comes to sports.

In your apology this morning, you said that these are “sensitive complicated issues” and that good answers essentially elude us. But while these issues may be sensitive, the truth is that they aren’t that complicated, and the solutions are rather obvious: We must continue segregating sport by biological sex if we want women’s sports to continue to exist. There’s no way around this. Womanhood is not a feeling or a costume or an idea in a confused man’s head. It’s material reality stamped into every single cell of a female body, and when it comes to sports, the courage to unapologetically name the difference is often a matter of physical safety.

I appreciate your desire to express kindness, but I hope, perhaps with a naive degree of optimism, that maybe the backlash you received this past week will inspire you to think a little more deeply on these issues and come to the conclusion that the true victims of this entire debacle are the females, not the male athletes expected to participate in sports with members of their own sex.

When gender identity wins, women always lose. I’d like to see women win a bit more often. I’m praying you will find the courage to boldly want this, too.

Optimistically,

A washed up former athlete who knows the importance of sex segregation in sports