Gymnasts still troll me after all these years.
No matter how many times I get it right and they get it wrong.
Some of my most passionate and persistent trolls are from the gymnastics community. They’ve hated me for so many years now for one reason or another — back to 2008 when I wrote Chalked Up exposing the rampant abuse in the sport — that I don’t much notice it anymore.
However, I did notice it in 2021 when an anonymous cohort of self-proclaimed gym junkies on Reddit started a petition to get me ousted from my job. They achieved 52 signatures and made a lot of calls to an ethics hotline at my place of employ.
These are some of the nicer ones from various Reddit threads with names like Jennifer Sey is an idiot. Or Jen Sey is sickening. (PS I don’t know why I’m writing about this on Christmas Eve but I started it a while ago and figured I’d finish it.)
Per the lower left post, I am in fact very pro public school. Which is why I wanted them open!! All four of my kids have gone or currently go to public school. Which is why I fight to make them better. The C-suiter assholes who advocated for prolonged school closures during covid or stayed silent in the face of them, were the ones sending their kids to private schools and I’d argue that very much qualifies as “anti-public school.” How can these people be so dumb?
The people obsessed with gymnastics are among the weirdest, most juvenile people I’ve ever come across. It’s like they are permanently stunted at the age at which they wish they’d been great gymnasts. But they weren’t. So they are forever fan girls.
I also notice trolling from people I used to consider friends or people I looked up to in the sport. Their snark pops up in my feed and I think back to when I craved their approval, wanted to be in their orbit. Not just as a young gymnast, but even later, as an adult, before I ejected myself from the community by writing Chalked Up.
They were opposed to my anti-lockdown stance and are now opposed to my stance on protecting women’s sports. They consider themselves good lefties. They consider themselves the resistance. They are a joke.
It isn’t surprising that gymnasts and former gymnasts have little ability to think for themselves. It’s kind of a requirement for succeeding in the sport. Do not push back on abusive coaching. Do not challenge your coach. Ever. Accept all manner of abuse as tough coaching and if you don’t, you’re the problem. You are weak. Not worthy of being coached let alone making the team.
Some have carried this into adulthood. Why not? It worked in childhood and adolescence. Obedience transformed into Olympic Team berths and medals. Only now they somehow adopt the stance of the resistance. (Whereas as young gymnasts, there was no pretending you were anything other than a supreme rule follower. There were no rebels in our midst.)
Their youthful allegiance to their coach and the sport of gymnastics and USAG’s policies has mutated into allegiance to the Democratic Party. That is their primary affiliation now. Well, maybe it’s tied with their “former gymnast” status.
Subjugation of the self led to winning. Winning made them feel unique and special. And they were. They are. As gymnasts. Not as thinkers. But now they are confused and conflating their unique flipping abilities with excellence in all ways.
Those who most vociferously pushed back on my covid stance (anti lockdown) and now my stance on gender ideology (pro sex is binary, pro truth, pro biology), also did not support me and others who first exposed abuse in the sport back in the 2000s. And they did not support the gymnasts who first came forward about sexual abuse suffered at the hands of Larry Nassar in 2016 either. Most have deleted their takes, but I’ll summarize here, because yes, I remember.
In a phone call with a 1984 Olympian after Nassar was arrested but before he was convicted, former gymnast-now-“gym royalty” (we’ll call her “J”) said to me: You’re going about this wrong. Why drag USAG through the mud? We need to work with them and with USAG President Steve Penny if we want to get anything done.
Working with USAG had always worked for her. Why not continue it?
But we were talking about the Steve Penny who directed his staff to destroy evidence of Nassar’s abuse. There was no working with this man.
I told her I don’t work with liars, abusers and criminals. And I went about my business calling it out publicly, in the press, in Athlete A, in op-eds. Which was distasteful to J. But necessary. And effective.
Once the Nassar story blew up, this same person pretended to be a champion for the victims. She hadn’t been but always reliably jumped on the bandwagon once the actual brave people had put themselves out there.
These ex-gymnasts cannot stand the idea of not being liked by this community and the “leaders” in it. Being an Olympian and being celebrated in the gymnastics world and the Olympic sports movement more broadly is a huge part of their identities. They will not forsake its leaders and risk being ousted as good-standing members. They remain good little girls.
Another Olympian — this one in the 1988 games, let’s call her “S” — attacked Jamie Dantzscher (Oly, 2000) — when Dantzscher first filed a civil lawsuit against Nassar and USAG for sexual abuse. (I’m being nice, not trying to start a pile on by naming names.)
Dantzscher filed as a Jane Doe but the community figured out who it was in real time. I watched it all unfold on social media. S — a self-proclaimed social justice warrior/feminist — dismissed Dantzscher’s claims by calling her an unreliable narrator, an alcoholic, a slut.
This is before me too, so it was ok to blame victims of sexual assault for bringing it on themselves. Or to simply malign a woman’s character as evidence that “she deserved it.” Cue George Stephanopoulos attacking Bill Clinton’s many credible accusers with his “nuts and sluts” strategy.
This same Olympian now loves snarking at me. Sorry, but if you thought slandering a victim of sexual assault who was brave enough to come forward and expose a criminal who had abused for 30 years was a good idea, you really have poor judgement. And you’re not a feminist or a progressive of any kind. You’re a cultist who will defend the gym community no matter what. And now, when that is no longer en vogue, you’ll defend the Democratic Party no matter what. Even when they say totally stupid shit like men can be women, men can get pregnant and some women have penises.
It doesn’t take a genius to know none of that is based in reality. But it does take someone unafraid to challenge group think. Their group’s think.
The same 1984 Olympian cited above — J — attacked me during covid relentlessly. Accused me of “trying to get Trump elected” by opposing school closures. I was disloyal to Democrats. I was a Trumper. I was an alt-right fascist. I was too selfish and stupid to know any better. The argument was never that what I was saying was wrong or even dangerous. Only that it was not politically expedient for Democrats therefore, it was wrong and immoral. And I was obviously stupid.
As I was writing my last book, Levi’s Unbuttoned, I went back to try to find the offending posts and I couldn’t. I saw my responses. But not hers. And on Facebook you can’t see that posts have been deleted so I was very confused. It appeared that I was having a conversation with myself.
And then I realized she had deleted them all — or her husband had, who often posts on her handle. It was no longer cool to bully young people for going to the beach or harangue parents for mentioning children were suffering without school. Or maybe — in hindsight — it was grotesquely classist to open private schools but not public ones and to malign anyone who called that out. So she just pretended she hadn’t done those things.
What bugs me the most is that these women think they are the resistance. They think they are good trouble. When in reality, they are no trouble at all. They’ve likely never been in a room and stood up to say a thing — a very true thing — that every single person in the room disagreed with. They lack that kind of courage. They exist in Reddit threads where everyone agrees with them and surround themselves on Bluesky and in real life with people parroting the same taglines they do: Trans women ARE women; Stay home stay safe; 2 weeks to flatten the curve; Of course some men get pregnant!
But they adopt the stance of those who have the courage to stand apart from the crowd. They are conformists pretending to be rebels.
I’ve got news:
You’re not a feminist if you attack rape victims and call them sluts.
You’re not “progressive” if you thought closed public schools (for 18 months!) were a good idea during covid.
You have no moral compass if you think it’s a good idea to cut off kids’ healthy body parts.
You aren’t a social justice warrior if you leave snarky comments on Facebook then delete them later, when your dumb arguments have clearly lost.
And you are not smart or clever if you think men can get pregnant. You are impossibly gullible and embarrassingly credulous. You probably also nodded enthusiastically when Joe Scarborough said Biden is the best Biden ever despite the fact that he has clearly been demented for some time now.
Why am I thinking about these people right now? These old ex athletes who haven’t mattered in my life in many years? I think it is because they mirror a whole big group of people who are finally speaking up about the insane illiberalism, the suffocating cancel culture of the last 5-10 years. They are pretending to be brave saying stuff like:
We can speak freely now!
Cancel culture was so oppressive!
The mood has shifted! We need to end it once and for all!
I can breathe!
Where were you all!? You aren’t brave. You’re late. You’re not the resistance, you’re bandwagoners. It’s fine you were late. It was oppressive, jobs and friends were lost for stepping out of line. But please spare me the cocky stance now that it is safe and cancel culture has lost its mojo.
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to everyone out there who isn’t a conformist! Cheers to those who stand up to tyranny! And aren’t afraid to stand up in defense of children and free speech and bodily autonomy, at great personal risk. I hope you all have an amazing holiday.
Jen: Very well articulated. Even as a lifelong liberal you were able to see through the covid, school shutdown and trans insanity. You did not go along with the crowd. And really it is not about the politics of right, left, or progressive but just common sense.
Preach sister! I’m in medicine and we clearly have our I-drank-the-cool aid crowd as well, and they are slower to turn than anyone, because doctors always think they are the smartest person in the room. Bunch of credible nerds with limited social skills is more like it.