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Simone Biles of the U.S. during the Artistic Gymnastics Team Final for Women at the Bercy Arena during the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games.
The champion gymnast had criticized anti-trans activist Riley Gaines.
Olympic champion gymnast Simone Biles is apologizing for personal aspects of her criticism of Riley Gaines, a former college athlete who has become an activist against transgender women’s inclusion in women’s sports. Biles has reiterated, however, that sports should be inclusive and that trans athletes deserve empathy and respect.
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Biles had tweeted at Gaines over the weekend, “You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser. 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. Maybe a transgender category IN ALL sports!! But instead… You bully them… One things for sure is no one in sports is safe with you around!!!!!”
Biles was responding to Gaines’s comment on a post from the Minnesota State High School League celebrating Champlin Park High School’s championship in girls’ softball. The team has a trans player who pitched a shutout to give Champlin Park a win. “Comments off lol. To be expected when your star player is a boy,” Gaines observed.
Gaines was on the swim team at the University of Kentucky. In 2022, she tied with Lia Thomas, a trans swimmer on the women's team at the University of Pennsylvania, for fifth in one event. She became outspoken against trans women’s inclusion after that.
She responded to Biles’s first post by calling it “disappointing.” She also said, “Simone Biles being a male-apologist at the expense of young girls’ dreams? Didn’t have that on my bingo card,” she continued. “Maybe she could compete in pommel horse and rings in 2028.”
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Then Tuesday, Biles tweeted, “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. 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. I was not advocating for policies that compromise fairness in women’s sports. My objection is to be singling out children for public scrutiny in ways that feel personal and harmful. Individual athletes — especially kids — should never be the focus of criticism of a flawed system they have no control over. I believe sports organizations have a responsibility to come up with rules supporting inclusion while maintaining fair competition. We all want a future for sport that is fair, inclusive, and respectful.”
After Biles tweeted her apology, Gaines posted that she accepted it, adding, “A couple of things. Sports ARE inclusive by nature. Anyone can and everyone SHOULD play sports. Competition, on the other hand and by definition, is exclusive. So the idea of ‘competitive equity’ is nonsensical.”
Gaines also refused to recognize trans girls and women as female. “Secondly, the boys are publicly humiliating the girls. To suggest that women and girls must be silent or ignore a boy who is PUBLICLY hurting or humiliating them is wrong. You can’t have any empathy and compassion for the girls if you’re ignoring when young men are harming or abusing them. I am not ashamed to be a voice for the voiceless.” She went on to praise Donald Trump’s executive order threatening to withhold federal funding from any school that allows trans women and girls to play on female teams.
In reality, there are very few trans athletes and they don't dominate women's sports. For instance, Charlie Baker, head of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, has estimated there are fewer than 10 trans athletes among a more than 500,000 total athletes in the NCAA. He did not say how many were trans men or trans women.
