Last week, Townhall covered how Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and women’s sports advocate Riley Gaines went back and forth on X over the issue of male athletes masquerading as women in women’s sports.
The feud began when Gaines posted a photo of a high school softball league that won a state championship. Gaines noted that the “star player” on the squad is a boy who thinks he is a girl.
“To be expected when your star player is a boy,” Gaines said in response to the post about the team.
“Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male,” Biles said to Gaines in response.
Predictably, Biles got torched for her stance on transgender athletes competing in women’s sports and for body shaming Gaines.
She eventually offered an “apology,” but that wasn’t enough to smooth over the damage she caused.
In the days following Biles’ public feud with Gaines, reports broke that USA Gymnastics would assess its transgender athlete inclusion policy.
According to Fox News, USA Gymnastics removed its transgender athlete guidelines from its website. A spokesperson told the outlet that the policies were removed “to assess compliance with the current legal landscape," a spokesperson said.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order prohibiting male athletes from competing in women's sports, as Townhall covered.
Reportedly, the organization no longer required trans athletes to undergo sex reassignment, legal gender recognition, and hormone therapy in order to compete in the gender category of their choosing. The meant that men could say that they were women and compete against women.
Given Biles recent spotlight on the issue, it’s likely that USA Gymnastics will flip their stance.
Dee Worley, a former USA Gymnastics athlete and board member, told Fox News that she thinks the organization will amend the policy, but with loopholes (via Fox News):
Worley predicts that the organization will announce an official amendment to its policy, but not one that goes far enough as she'd like.
"I predict they will amend the language leaving lots of loopholes and flexibility for them to be just nebulous enough for them to change their minds if and when the time comes," Worley said.
"I think they are very pressure driven and externally focus driven instead of being principle driven. So you cannot depend on any organization that does not stand on anything or have actual values that they refused to bend on."
Worley is a member of the Independent Council on Women's Sports (ICONS) network, which works to preserve the integrity of women’s sports.
