Simone’s bile

There was an optimistic time when sex-realist commentators assumed that men in women’s sports would be the issue that made fellow travellers of the trans lobby see the light — that the images of the hulking figure of Lia (formerly William) Thomas elevated on the podium beside his comparatively tiny female competitors would be enough to make the true believers think twice.

In hindsight this was naive. The harrowing tales of detransitioners failed by the medical establishment hadn’t worked, and neither had the prospect of male rapists in women’s prisons. This was an ideological parasite that dug itself in deeper the more that common sense was thrown at the host.

Still, it looks like we have entered the beginning of the end. Between the backlash to the trans-pandering US Democrat party, the slow back-pedalling of medical boards on puberty blockers for minors and the UK Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act (even Australia is starting to show signs of sanity), those waving the pride progress flag will almost definitely be waving white ones. Someday. There are sadly too many victims of the sunk cost fallacy who will make this cultural shift as slow as possible — and picking up new recruits along the way.

To this end, it was both shocking and unsurprising to see a female athlete publicly turning on another female athlete campaigning to *checks notes* save women’s sport. Simone Biles, the seven-time Olympian gold medal winning gymnast has lambasted swimmer and champion of fairness for women and girls in sport, Riley Gaines. What moved Biles to start her attack was Gaines sharing a picture of a children’s softball team in Minnesota that (allegedly) has a boy on it. I’m not wild about people with large followings sharing pictures of children on the basis of safeguarding. If Biles had merely been taking issue with this, I’d probably be on her side. Alas though, she used it as an excuse for sheer, virtue-signalling venom. On X, Biles called Gaines “sick” and “a sore loser”, adding:

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!! [sic]

Okay, let’s get the bingo card out. Take points for the following: ad hominem insults, the fallacious appeal to motive, mean-girl “be kind” shaming, and the revolutionary idea for a third category that sex-realist feminists first argued for a decade ago. All we need now is some blatant misogyny that reveals that deep down, she does know what a female person is.

Bingo. Full house. Biles posted again later with a targeted remark to Gaines: “bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male” [sic].

Attempting to humiliate a woman by comparing her frame to a man’s, while calling her the bully. This was a truly exceptional episode of progressivism in action. 

It remains a deeply uncomfortable and exasperating fact that the women-hating extremes of trans activism have been enabled mostly by women (the flip side being women have also been the most persistent and brave people in the fight against it). Every step taken by women’s rights campaigners to claw back their rights from the pastel Taliban can be guaranteed vicious opposition by members of their own sex. In April, after the UK Supreme Court ruled that water was wet, for instance, Derry Girls actress Nicola Coughlan suddenly became someone you had heard of overnight by chirruping libfem talking points about “cis men” being the real danger to women and raising thousands of pounds for a trans charity. Likewise, thousands of feminist academics (I’m tempted to put air quotes around both those words) signed a posturing “not in our name” petition opposing the existence of women as a sex class.

The question of why so many women throw their fellow women under the bus for men who want to be women is one with many answers, both fascinating and depressing. Toxic extremes of feminine empathy are often explained as internalised sexism. Mothers who have a trans-identifying child or are close to someone who has a trans-identifying child see it as an exercise in maternal protection — and, as Helen Joyce has often said, the potential consequences of having wrongly affirmed are too devastating to process. In cases like Coughlan and Biles, I don’t think self-serving status-seeking can be overstated. Narcissism has no gender.

Interestingly, though, Biles’ savage little attack on Gaines is earning her consequences as well as kudos. Athleta, the sportswear brand Biles is spokeswoman for, is under pressure from customers to drop her. People online — including Gaines — have wasted no time in digging up old posts of Biles in which she — gasp! — sounds fairly terfy herself on matters of men in women’s sports. 

The level and ferocity of pushback has given me a dark hope

Beyond this though, there’s astonishingly low public support for biological men in women’s sport — and much greater incredulity that it was ever allowed to happen. Roughly 80 per cent of Americans oppose it. It was one of, if not the, most unpopular policies the Democrats backed and was utilised gleefully by Trump’s campaign to paint them as the comparative loonies. Moderate leftists and card-carrying Democrats such as transsexual woman Brianna Wu have even pleaded they drop it. Granted, while Biles’s post wasn’t openly advocating for trans-identified males in women’s sport, in a climate where teenage girls are being forced to undress in front of boys in P.E. changing rooms, and having their sporting opportunities stolen in plain sight, it seems bizarre to go after a woman representing such an obviously good and sensible cause — protection and fairness for little girls. 

I don’t relish the social media feminist catfight this has become, nor do I condone the right-wing profiles now going after Biles’s appearance for cheap, if plentiful, likes by those in the Team Gaines camp. The backlash Biles has brought on herself, combined with the lovebombing from ideologues, will likely only cement her position. And yet the level and ferocity of pushback has given me a dark hope. It fills me with pride and admiration, while simultaneously making me sick to my stomach, to see young women — girls — bravely speaking out about their sporting rights, sold down the river by the cowardly authorities and adults who failed them. Whether she realises it or not, Biles is doing acrobatics on behalf of the latter. It would be highly satisfying to see her fall.