Simone Biles is adding clarity to her recent statements about transgender athletes. She also apologized for “making things personal” with online activist and former swimmer Riley Gaines.
Biles is making headlines for going head-to-head with Gaines, a conservative, ex-NCAA swimmer turned anti-LGBTQIA commenter. Initially, Gaines made a post on X mocking a Minnesota girls’ high school baseball team’s championship win, as one of the athletes is transgender. Gaines sought to diminish the team’s victory by calling the minor a “boy.”
Biles took exception to the attempt at dismissing and mocking the minors’ accomplishment. During the back-and-forth, Simone pointed out Gaines’s rhetoric and divisiveness.
“You should be uplifting the trans community and perhaps finding a way to make sports inclusive OR creating a new avenue where trans feel safe in sports,” she responded.
She also made the conversation personal by bringing up the conservative’s failed professional career. Gaines once tied for fifth place in a professional meet against a transgender athlete. She has rallied against trans-athletes in sports ever since.
“You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser,” Biles posted on X.
On June 10, the Olympic gold medalist followed up her initial post with a more nuanced take that outlined her grievance with Gaines’s commentary. Biles, a true class act and professional, also apologized for drawing attention to Gaines’s personal failures.
“I wanted to follow up from my last tweets. I’ve always believed competitive equity & inclusivity are both essential in sport. The current system doesn’t adequately balance these important principles, which often leads to frustration and heated exchanges, and it didn’t help for me to get personal with Riley, which I apologize for,” she posted.
Biles’s position as the greatest and most accomplished gymnast of all time lends great weight to her words. As such, she explained that the core of her message is inclusivity. While laws are being created to ban transgender athletes from sports, Biles suggests we find a solution to allow everyone to compete. More to her point, she discouraged attacking minors to further anyone’s agenda.
“Individual athletes—especially kids—should never be the focus of criticism of a flawed system they have no control over,” Biles wrote.
Indeed, no singular athlete has control over rules or policy changes. Though players’ unions may have input, the onus is on governing bodies to create, in Biles’s words, rules supporting inclusion while maintaining fair competition.
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