The message was blunt, blistering and wildly off-brand. Simone Biles, the transcendent gymnast whose gravity-defying routines have been appointment viewing at the past three Olympics, needed just one social media post to shred her wholesome image in the most jarring fashion.
Railing against Riley Gaines, the former swimmer who has campaigned vigorously to keep biological males out of women’s sport, she wrote on X: “Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.” With that crass drive-by shot, she definitively affirmed the old Warren Buffett maxim of it taking 20 years to build a reputation and just five minutes to ruin it.
For Biles, the provocation, if you could call it that, was Gaines’ highlighting of the fact that a Minnesota girls’ softball team won a state title this month despite their dominant pitcher being male. “Your star player is a boy,” she said, prompting Biles, until that point a mute figure in the ferocious battle to compel sports to respect the reality of sex, to go off the deep end.
“You’re truly sick,” she raged at Gaines, who was infamously denied a United States collegiate trophy in 2022 by transgender opponent Lia Thomas. “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 [people] feel safe in sports. Maybe a transgender category in all sports. But instead, you bully them. One thing is for sure: no one in sports is safe with you around.”
The problem was not just her language or her highly personal attack, but her mind-bending hypocrisy. Could this truly be the same Biles who attracted universal sympathy at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, when she withdrew from several events to concentrate on her mental health? Was it the same person who, in 2020, made an impassioned statement decrying body-shaming and the pressure on women to conform to perceived standards of beauty?
“I’d be lying if I told you that what people say about my arms, my legs, my body, how I look in a dress, leotard, bathing suit or even casual pants hasn’t got me down at times,” she said then. Now here she was, five years on, mocking a female athlete with a similarly muscular physique – but a radically different view on the transgender debate – as a “male”.
It is a parable for our times, in many ways, where those preaching about kindness often reveal themselves as the least kind of all. For Biles, desperate to be seen as an ally of the trans community, going after Gaines was the logical extension of her activism, which has involved frequent promotions of LGBT Pride Month. Except the move has backfired horribly, with Biles’ stock falling faster than that of Bud Light, which lost its place in 2023 as America’s best-selling beer after a tone-deaf partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Danica Patrick, a trailblazer for women as the first female winner of an IndyCar race, was quick to take Gaines’ side, saying: “Defending men in women’s sports is the woke mind virus and/or another issue that requires therapy. Either way, it is so irrational.”
So, too, was Martina Navratilova, despite being the polar ideological opposite to Gaines – a committed Republican – as a Democrat to her core. “I couldn’t disagree with her more on politics, but on keeping sports safe and fair for women and girls, I agree with her 100 per cent,” said the nine-time Wimbledon singles champion. “As most people, Republicans and Democrats and everything in between, do also.”
The backlash to Biles has not stopped there. This week, MyKayla Skinner, a US gymnast who fell out with her at last summer’s Paris Games after suggesting Biles’ team-mates were not of a high enough standard, alleged that the seven-time Olympic champion’s targeting of Gaines formed part of a pattern.
“Throughout my career, there have been many times when I have been belittled and bullied by Simone and have wanted to keep quiet for the other athletes,” Skinner said. “I’ve wanted to stay silent through this, because she has a huge platform.”
Biles has not responded to the comments, although she has offered a carefully-scripted apology to Gaines, acknowledging: “It didn’t help for me to get personal with Riley.” She explained: “These are sensitive, complicated issues that I truly don’t have the answers to or solutions to, but I believe it starts with empathy and respect.”
There is no pleasure to be taken in Biles’ unexpected fall from grace. She is perhaps the most captivating athlete of her age, setting herself fiendishly complex repertoires but performing them with apparent effortlessness. At 4ft 8in, with a powerful build, she has the perfect body shape for executing her absurd twists and flips, maximising time in the air before somehow unwinding all her rotational energy to stick the landing. She has five skills named after her in gymnastics’ Code of Points: two on vault, two on floor, one on balance beam. Watching her unleash her Catherine-wheel kinetics at the Olympics is, truly, a supreme sporting pleasure. All of which has made her self-immolation on social media so cringeworthy.
Biles’ mistake was to put the projection of virtue before even a fleeting consideration of fairness. None of her astounding distinctions – the 11 Olympic medals, the 30 world championship medals, 23 of them gold – would have been possible without the existence of the female category. The same applies to the most dominant women in any sport. Serena Williams alluded to this once with talk show host David Letterman when asked what would happen if she played against Andy Murray, subsequently her mixed doubles partner at Wimbledon, in singles. “Men’s tennis and women’s tennis are almost two separate sports,” she said. “If I were to play Andy, I would lose 6-0, 6-0 in five to six minutes, maybe 10. The men are a lot faster, they serve harder, they hit harder. It’s just a different game.”
Williams’ remarks stand as the best rebuke to the trans rights zealots who argue that women should just show some compassion by allowing men into their sports. Elite competition is segregated by sex for a reason: male physiological advantage is immutable, with every world-record time in women’s athletics between 100 metres and 1500m having been broken by 14- and 15-year-old boys. Biles only needs to take a cursory look at her own sport to grasp this principle, given that the pommel horse and rings exercises – both requiring prodigious degrees of upper-body strength – are reserved exclusively for men.
After their events at the 2023 world championships in Antwerp, Biles and Fred Graham, a member of the US men’s team, decided to have a little fun by copying each other’s routines. Biles’ challenge was to copy the explosive floor flares typically seen only in men’s gymnastics. She crumpled after only a couple of spins, just as Graham tried and failed to emulate her immaculate wolf turn. In terms of artistry and flexibility, she could eclipse anyone alive, male or female. But when it comes to the power-focused disciplines prioritised on the men’s side, she would be nowhere. So why, in sports that do place a premium on power, is she calling for ways for biological men to be accommodated alongside women? Why is she denigrating Gaines for defending the sex-based rights of a high-school softball team? Why are those girls any less deserving of fairness than she is?
Navratilova: Women deserve to have privacy, safety and dignity
Biles imagined she had found the ideal compromise solution when she advocated introducing a specific transgender category. This has already been attempted, though, and swiftly abandoned. In 2023, World Swimming, reacting to the Lia Thomas scandal, became the first global governing body to trial an “open” category for transgender athletes, but not a single entry was received. Is this truly a situation where trans people desire nothing more than to participate according to their self-declared “gender identity”? Or is it more about mediocre men seeking to dominate women?
The row has now escalated to the point where even Biles’ history in testifying against Larry Nassar, the former US team doctor who sexually abused hundreds of female gymnasts, has been weaponised against her. “All the horrific sexual abuse Simone Biles witnessed and spoke out against caused by one man, yet [she] believes women should be forced to strip naked in front of men to validate the man’s feelings,” Gaines said. Many have accused Gaines of going much too far in bringing Nassar’s name into the equation, with Stephen A Smith, the most influential sports pundit in America, telling her the tactic was “really below the belt”.
Gaines, however, has held firm. “I stand by what I said 100 per cent,” she clarified. “Nassar is a monster, who should spend every day for the rest of his life rotting in jail. But does it get more perverted than standing in a shower totally undressed when a 6ft 4in male, fully naked and fully intact, comes in and watches you shower?”
This is the scenario that she alleges she was forced to endure when Thomas was permitted by the National Collegiate Athletics Association to swim competitively as a woman and, by extension, to enter female changing quarters. So, too, does Paula Scanlan, Thomas’ former team-mate at the University of Pennsylvania, who says she has suffered “nightmares” about the experience.
To be clear, Biles has not explicitly endorsed the idea of shared changing facilities. But she is under attack because she appears not to have given the implications of her supposedly inclusive philosophy the slightest thought. If she is relaxed about women sharing their sports with men, does this same laissez-faire attitude apply to the showers? And if it does, surely this is the very opposite of what it means to be progressive?
“What is regressive is thinking it’s OK to allow any males who say they are trans into women’s sex-based spaces, like locker rooms,” Navratilova says. “That is peak misogyny and peak patriarchy. We women deserve to have privacy, safety and dignity.”
For Biles, it never needed to be this way. If she had taken the same care over an incendiary issue as she did over her recent corporate platitudes about the Met Gala and the Kentucky Derby, she could have averted this PR calamity. Instead, she appealed to the bleeding hearts by calling Gaines a “bully” and wound up looking like the bully herself.
Ultimately, Biles has stoked such outrage through the impression she has left of pulling up the bridge behind her. Having forged her own legend thanks to the presence of a women’s sporting category, she seems to assume that the girls following in her wake are unworthy of the same protections, that they should simply tolerate the addition of males for the sake of being inclusive.
This month, she has a Netflix documentary out that depicts her – not unreasonably, given the scale of her feats – as a champion for women. But that is a credential she has just torched.
How can you build a legacy in women’s sport while acquiescing in the type of thinking that would lead to the erasure of women’s achievements? This is not 2020 any longer, a time when Biles could have been assured of glossy publicity for her trans allyship. It is 2025, and her double standards are laid bare for the world to see.
