Earlier this week, Simone Biles landed on the bad side of the right when she called out anti-trans activist Riley Gaines on Twitter. When Gaines clutched her pearls over a Minnesota high school softball team winning the state title with a trans pitcher, Biles was having none of it.
For those who don’t recall, Gaines tied for fifth in the 200-yard freestyle at the 2022 NCAA swimming championships with Penn’s Lia Thomas.
In the last few days, right-wingers have blasted Biles for joining a campaign to erase women from sports. Gaines’ colleagues at right-leaning sports blog OutKick have joined in on the parade. But one of Gaines’ buddies at OutKick, Zach Dean, crossed a line. He mocked Biles for pulling out of several events at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo—even though it’s been well-documented that she did so for her own safety. And in so doing, to use the most diplomatic terms I can use, Dean proved he’s an asshole of the highest order.
Dean was ostensibly highlighting how Danica Patrick claimed that Biles had been bitten by the “woke mind virus” when she tweeted at Gaines. But in the process, Dean took some potshots at Biles’ well-documented efforts to balance her competitive fire with her mental health.
Side note: I've ALWAYS hated Simone Biles. My wife's entire family is big into gymnastics, so they all rave about Simone. Not me. I cut through her BS long ago. She's the Ellen DeGeneres of sports. All the suburban moms LOVED her, but I always knew she was a prick.
I've never bought into the Simone hype. I've known she was a fraud since she quit in Japan a few years back.
It was painfully obvious where Dean was going with the headline of his piece: “Danica Patrick Tells Quitter Simone Biles To Go Where She Belongs.” But even allowing for that, Dean’s line here is vile. And even a cursory amount of research—a skill that a lot of journalists seem to have forgotten—makes it even more vile.
Had Dean bothered to do a simple Google search, he would have seen that Biles had a very good reason for pulling out of multiple events in Tokyo. She told reporters at the time that she’d had an attack of “the twisties,”or loss of air awareness, at several points during the Tokyo Games. She chalked it up to a welter of mental health issues.
Had Biles pressed through as Dean apparently would have wanted her to do, she could have been seriously injured, even paralyzed. I repeat—to use the most diplomatic terms I can use, this makes Dean an asshole. Period, full stop. And the fact this article was even allowed to run in its present form makes whoever edited and greenlighted it an asshole as well. I would have no qualms whatsoever about saying that to the faces of Dean and everyone else involved in the process that allowed this piece to go live. And that would be true even if I were anti-trans.
Has Dean considered even for one minute that someone could have been reading that piece who is going through issues similar to what Biles faced? That person may be thinking of speaking out, taking a break to focus on getting well—only to keep quiet for fear being called a “quitter” and a “fraud.” Do you want it on your conscience that you may have kept someone from getting help, Zach? Or are you too focused on your twisted idea of protecting women’s sports to see it, you asshole? I don’t cuss often here, but this article has had me burning up since I read it yesterday. It’s degrading bullshit like this that is why mental health still has a stigma in much of this country.
OutKick bills itself as a sports site that offers “common-sense analysis” while combatting “the destructive nature of ‘woke’ activism.” Apparently its idea of “common sense” entails taking below-the-belt shots at mental health. It has been under Fox’s umbrella since Clay Travis sold it in 2021. As little as we’ve come to expect from Fox, you would have thought they had at least some standards. Obviously they don’t, if this article got published.
To be sure, there are quite a few people on the anti-trans side whose moral compasses are severely warped. Like Libs of TikTok, who has more or less sat and watched while her posts have led to threats and harassment. Or Anna De Luca Slatz, founder of Reduxx, who finds it acceptable to invade people’s privacy in the name of protecting women’s sports and who, in a past life, found it acceptable to publish an op-ed by a neo-Nazi in her college’s paper. Now we can add OutKick to the list. After all, it apparently is so dedicated to keeping women from being erased that it is willing to make it harder to have an honest conversation about mental health.
