When hatred and bigotry rule the day.

Simone Biles was fed up with Riley Gaines' bullshit, and let her know it.

Where to begin, where to begin ... 

These are indeed troubling times in our nation. As highlighted in my last post here, our country is overrun with deputized groups of masked thugs, masquerading as law enforcement agents and carrying out the hate-filled and bigoted vision of America as possessed by President Donald J. Trump and his self-loathing shadow second-in-command, Stephen Miller. With cracks in their armor showing in their recent push to conduct immigration raids in Democrat-voting California, the would-be dictator has weaponized the California National Guard to supposedly protect the ICE agents, with the added twist of mobilizing a reported 700 U.S. Marines to stand by for duty on the streets of Los Angeles -- an action unprecedented in recent American history.

Our glorious Führer also ordered a massive parade of U.S. military might to take place this weekend in Washington, D.C. -- ostensively to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Army, but more to mark his own 79th birthday. It's the sort of thing that was all the rage on the streets of Moscow before the fall of Communism, and is still performed annually in North Korea to celebrate its own detached-from-reality dictator.

Amid all this, a social-media debate arose this past week that pitted perhaps the greatest American gymnast of all time, Olympian legend Simone Biles, against one of the foremost purveyors of bigotry and hatred in the MAGA sphere, former collegiate swimmer and devoted transphobe Riley Gaines. 

Biles, fed up with the constant spewing of hatred toward transgender athletes from Gaines -- who never represented the United States in any international competition and whose last competitive effort was to finish in a fifth-place tie with a transgender athlete at the NCAA championships -- let it all out in a post targeted against the former University of Kentucky athlete's frequent attacks upon transgender athletes.

Riley Gaines, notorious transphobe.

It all started when Gaines attacked a high school athlete from Minnesota that was a member of a state championship-winning softball team. "To be expected when your star player is a boy,” Gaines wrote in the post on X, referring to Marissa Rothenberger, a transgender athlete who is a pitcher for the team. Rothenberger helped the team secure the win with a shutout.

Biles quoted the post and wrote directly to Gaines, "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 thing’s for sure is no one in sports is safe with you around!!!!!”

Gaines, of course, became a MAGA activist after she finished behind four female-at-birth athletes and tied with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas in the NCAA championships. She has yet to stop complaining about having a transgender athlete take a solo fifth-place finish away from her.

This all went viral as both athletes engaged in a war of Twitterwords which included some bodyshaming and a huge dose of vitriol by the less successful of the two, including an embarrassing attempt by Gaines to liken the sexual abuse suffered by many gymnasts by Dr. Larry Nassar as the equivalent of having a transgender athlete on a girls' team. Eventually, Biles held out an olive branch and apologized for engaging Gaines -- although from the tone of the social media response over the length of the spat, Biles was the clear winner for calling out Gaines' bigotry.

As I read successive skirmishes in the Biles-Gaines war of words, I was frequently reminded of what may have been the most painful and disheartening two years of my career in sports journalism, either print or electronic.

It's no secret to most local followers of high school sports that there has been a transgender athlete playing for a local varsity team since her sophomore year. She has since graduated -- and yes, I will always refer to her with female pronouns because there is nothing I have witnessed over the past three sports seasons to think of her as anything but a talented, hard-working and personable young woman that earned the utmost respect from her coaches and fellow athletes.

And no, I will not use her name here, although it has been dragged through the mud in despicable fashion by those just as bigoted and angry as Ms. Gaines. If you don't know by now, perhaps it's best you don't know. Like many transgender athletes from across the country, her name was blasted all over a website called "hecheated.org," which exists solely to make the lives of transgender athletes living hells under the fraudulent guise of supporting the equal-rights legislation from the Education Amendments of 1972, popularly known as Title IX.

Before the right-wingers among you try to get all holier-than-thou with me and try to lecture me about the intent of Title IX, don't waste your effort. I won't pay attention to you. I've been writing professionally about the meaning and impact of Title IX for almost a half-century. Title IX was meant to promote equal opportunity for all students and student-athletes, and not to exclude anyone on the basis of gender identity. In fact, there has been plenty of legislation in this state and several others to further codify the rights of transgender individuals into existing law.

Over the span of that aforementioned half-century, I have met plenty of athletes that don't fit the "Ozzie and Harriet" definition of gender identity which seems to drive Trump and his dim-witted minions. I have known many gay athletes who felt the sting of prejudice while playing sports in the high schools and colleges. I've also known three individuals I can confirm that were transgender.

Let's look at that number in perspective. Over 50 years of writing for newspapers and announcing games for cable TV, and using ballpark estimations for roster sizes, available sports and the number of schools I covered, it's reasonable to suggest that I may have seen 286,500 athletes take to the fields, courts, ice or what have you during that time just from the 10 schools that I covered on a regular basis.

I was just a one-sport athlete,
but I don't count in these totals.

Now, let's just assume that of that figure, there were several athletes among them that played at least two sports. There used to be a lot more that played three, but over time, there has been more specialization and more athletes that had no interest in playing the traditional offerings such as football, basketball or baseball/softball and focused upon other disciplines. That would drop the total to 143,250. So three transgender athletes among those would represent exactly 0.00209 percent -- or in plain English, two one-thousandths of a percentage point.

Not exactly an army of young men just standing in line to cut off their penises and become female athletes, is it? Of course not. But that's what the MAGA wing of the Republican Party and its propaganda outlet, Fox News, would have you believe.

In fact, two of those athletes competed before this became an issue. I firmly believe that as a recently as 15 years ago, and maybe even more recently than that, transgender athletes in America could have competed happily and safely without drawing attention to themselves because nobody really cared until the ignorant and prejudiced among us started making an issue of it. Two of the athletes to which I alluded did finish their high school careers out of the relentless spotlight of public scrutiny, and I only learned their stories (and didn't write them) long after their school days were over. 

That's not to say their lives were a lot more peaceful; they weren't. Transitioning is a life-changing event, not entered into lightly, and not everyone understands or accepts it. There were issues, but it was confined to a much tighter circle of attention and not turned into a circus of hatred that stretched from coast to coast.

If there's one thing I have learned in my 71 years on this planet, it's that no two individuals are alike, regardless of their personal circumstances. There are as many different reasons for a person to want to change his or her entire life as there are people on this planet. And I have a hard time believing that for any of them, the reason was solely to finish in a fifth-place tie in a collegiate women's swimming event.

But then again, that's what MAGA would have you believe. Women's sports are under attack, they claim. Males with evil intent want to tuck their peckers between their legs, if not undertaking full castration, then dress up like girls and take all the ribbons away from their precious, helpless daughters. And God forgive that any of their sweet young things should be exposed to a naked penis in the locker room. That's assuming, of course, that Redneck Daddy hasn't already burst into her bedroom at night and taught her the facts of life through practical application. 

It makes me sick. And that's exactly what I felt when, late in the spring of 2023, a friend texted me and told me that a muckraking blogger that purports himself to be an "award-winning journalist" had attempted to out the girl playing locally.

The post on this individual's website was removed almost as swiftly as it went online, presumably under threat of legal action. But nothing is gone forever, and I read the offending post and saw all the accompanying photos that were lifted without permission from local newspapers. It's not the first time this fellow had sought to publicly shame transgender athletes, but to my knowledge, it's the first time I can recall him being forced to back down.

Trump signs his infamous executive order.

I never asked to know the full circumstances of this athlete's transition. It's none of my business. I know this person as the person she is, and that's good enough for me. I don't share in the morbid curiosity some individuals have, and I hoped that would fade with time.

The athlete continued to play with the full blessing of her coaches and her school's administration through the next season. Things settled down for a while. But after Trump returned to the Oval Office, and he issued his worthless executive order banning transgender athletes in women's sports, the undercurrent boiled over and spewed into the open. It reached an extreme when, through the encouragement of the "hecheated.org" website, an anti-trans protest was staged near the entrance to a school where the local girls' team was to play a scrimmage prior to the start of postseason play. Adults gathering to harass a high school athlete is a shameful and reprehensible act. 

I also learned that "hecheated.org" was being fed information, and its X/Twitter posts were retweeted frequently, by a parent of an athlete at another school in our area. I won't identify that individual because I have made it a career point never to hold the sins of parents against their sons or daughters, and the latter need not be publicly shamed. 

That's also why I did not send a letter I wrote that detailed the parent's actions to that school's athletic director, principal and superintendent. It was complete with screenshots of the social media posts intended to shame the local girl out of high school sports, and the envelopes were sealed -- but I stopped before the stamps went on.

Sadly, this is an illness that has infected our nation as a whole -- and attempting to remove one malignant freckle in this small corner of the continent wasn't going to result in a cure.

Over my life, I've made my share of mistakes. I've said hurtful or stupid things and I had some outmoded beliefs, but I'd like to believe that I learned from my mistakes and became a lot more accepting of those around me, no matter how different their lives are from mine. As my days grow shorter, I want to believe that I've become a better person by understanding two very important things about being a human being -- first, as I stated before, that there is infinite diversity in human existence and that you can not put every example of a divisive issue such as transgenderism into a satchel and come out with a folder that has all the answers; and second, when an experience arises that is outside my area of understanding, I at least attempt to ponder what it would be like to walk a mile in the shoes of those facing such a crisis. 

In the situation I've discussed here, I've asked myself what I would do if, as a parent, I had a child that was physically or psychologically challenged over sexual identity, and time after time I've come up with the same answer -- I would do anything that would give my child the opportunity to have a happier life. And that would require a full understanding of all the issues at hand, and knowledge of all the options available.

Many judge without trying to understand. Riley Gaines is one of those. Even now, she is taking a victory lap because Biles offered an apology. Gaines is smug, self-righteous and totally intractable in her fight against transgender participation in activities that are open to any other American citizen as guaranteed under the Constitution.

Speaking of Americans, Gaines' new husband isn't one. He's a British subject that swam at the University of Kentucky and now sells swimming pools for a living while his wife nurses at the tainted teat of Fox News. As of the beginning of this year, he was still not on a track to citizenship and had not been issued a Green Card because he refused to be immunized against COVID-19. MAGA types would call that another freeloading foreigner, right? ICE, anyone?

Maybe that's mean-spirited of me, but it would be even more so if I wished that Gaines and her new hubby would be blessed with a child that faced the same level of personal conflict as the transgender athletes mentioned here. It would be the ultimate irony that this purveyor of hatred and bigotry would be forced to face the same sort of agonizing decision in order to provide that child with a better life -- but I won't wish for that. There would be far too much pain involved, most of it likely to be experienced by the child.

No, I just want Riley Gaines to return to irrelevance -- which she was well on her way to achieving with her miserable finish in her last collegiate race. The best way to achieve that is to start at the ballot box in 2026, and to throw MAGA Republicans out of office in the Senate and House and to subject Trump to impeachment and removal from the presidency for the many hatred-fueled indignities he has made this nation endure during his relatively short time back in office. 

Maybe then, we can start to restore human values to a nation that has clearly lost its way.

MARK FARINELLA supports the rights of all Americans to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, without exception. Contact him at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.