I was an elite gymnast as a child. That sentence still sounds strange to me, even though it defined every hour of my life before most kids my age had a life that revolved around anything except school and play. Mine revolved around the gym. I made my first national team at 11. By then I was already training five or six hours a day. At 14, I moved away from home to a nationally recognized club. The hours got longer. The demands got tougher. The coaching got meaner.
I broke my ankle, and my coaches insisted to my doctor that the cast be taken off after only 10 days so I wouldn’t miss Nationals. I placed fifth in the country that year. The next year I qualified for World Championships. In Montreal at Worlds, in the last event, I fell and broke my femur. Everyone thought I was finished. I thought I was finished. Nine months later, I was national champion. That comeback remains the most physically grueling thing I have ever done. I have given birth to four children, two of them in my forties. Nothing compared to that season of grinding through a shattered femur and the wreckage it left in my body and in my head. In fact, my speedy return to the sport resulted in me breaking the ankle of the other leg, and then training on it broken for two more years. Needless to say, at 57, that ankle isn’t so functional. You can’t abuse your body like that without repercussions.
When I left the sport, I carried a corrosive sense of failure with me into my 20s and 30s. Despite the titles, I felt I hadn’t measured up. My coaches had told me so repeatedly, after all. They said I was garbage. I believed them.
It took 20 years after I walked away to recover enough to write about what had actually happened inside those gyms. In 2008, I published a book called “Chalked Up” about the emotional and physical abuse I had lived through. I was not ready for the backlash. Social media was still young, and I was naïve about how vicious it could be.
Everyone came for me: Former teammates from my private club and Team USA. Coaches. USA Gymnastics. Governing bodies around the world. They called me a liar and a grifter and, worse, a bitter, angry ex-gymnast who was inventing abuse because I had sucked at the sport and wanted revenge for my own failure. The thinking, I suppose, was that if I had been good enough, I would have stayed quiet and grateful.
The truth was simpler and less convenient. I did not want another little girl to go through what I had gone through. Sports are supposed to lift girls up. They are supposed to give them self-esteem, a sense of mastery, and a body they trust. They are not supposed to leave them having to rebuild themselves from the ground up.
When the world came for me, I retreated at first. I was terrified. We canceled readings for my book because of threats. Nearly 20 years ago, my publisher didn’t know what to make of it — who might show up, or whether someone might actually try to hurt me. So, we called it off.
Then I gathered myself. If they were attacking this hard, I decided there must be even more I did not know. It had to be worse than I imagined. And no one else was willing to pursue it. I went back in. I stopped saying this was only my personal story. I said the sport was rotten to the core, that the training protocols were harmful to young girls, that sexual abuse was rampant, and that the old guard needed to go.
When the Larry Nassar story broke, I was proven 100% correct. But no one apologized. They pretended they had always supported me. I accepted them in the fight anyway. It has always been about protecting the athletes, not about building myself up or becoming famous. I welcomed them. No questions asked; no apologies required.
I was cheered for a while. I made a documentary called “Athlete A” about abuse in gymnastics, and it won an Emmy.
Then I decided to stand up for kids during COVID. I lived in deep-blue San Francisco, and from day one I was opposed to school closures. I was chased down the street and called a murderer for saying to open the schools on what was then Twitter. A woman spat at me and said she wouldn’t care when my children died — just because I had taken my four-year-old daughter, unmasked, to an empty San Francisco beach.
I ultimately lost the city I loved, almost every friend I ever had, and a career I spent 30 years building. It was crushing. This is not the kind of attention anyone seeks willingly. I did it because of the children.
People still ask why free speech and children were the hill I was willing to die on. You gave up everything, they say. My answer: if you won’t die on a hill for free speech and children, do you even have a hill?
I would argue no.
And here we are.
At 55, I decided to start a company, which to most people is an insane idea. I should have been getting ready to retire. Instead, I am out here championing women’s sports and trying to take the culture back from crazy people who have decided that men can become women if they put on a little lip gloss.
The physical demands of a startup are relentless. The emotional ones never end. And the pushback for this brand taking this stance – women’s sports are for women – is worse than anything I experienced standing up for young gymnasts or during COVID, which was itself a worldwide lunatic asylum of policy.
I now have open FBI investigations because of threats to my life and my employees’ lives. Not mean direct messages, but real threats. Detailed descriptions of what they would do to me, my team, and our kids. Just last week, a man walked into our offices and demanded a meeting with “Jennifer Sey!” He was dirty, unkempt, and shaking. I was sitting with three members of my staff. We all understood at the same moment that he meant us harm. Four terrified women somehow got him out of the building.
My FBI contact told me I needed to call 911 immediately when I reached out about the man in the office. That did nothing to calm me. Later she called to say she was sure it wasn’t the same person who usually harasses me by phone, as if that would make me feel better. It didn’t.
It seemed to me he had been sent by people who hate me to scare me. He used my name but did not know my face.
Mission accomplished. I was scared. I was terrified he would show up at my house that night while I was home alone with my daughter, with my husband out of town with our son. A private security guy I know came by as a favor. He sat outside for a few hours, but I felt bad and said he could go. We’d be fine. He left me bear spray that still sits in my bedside table. I slept with one eye open all weekend and one arm holding my daughter close. I am still scared he will come back and pull off whatever he planned.
Everyone tells me to be careful. What does that even mean? Charlie Kirk had round-the-clock security. He was murdered in front of the world.
Beyond the ordinary startup challenges — cash management, always needing new investors, a business that is unpredictable as it gets established, working around the clock — I also have to deal with people who want to see me dead. This is on top of the endless hit pieces, which intensify and increase in volume as our profile rises. And the hit pieces, of course, never deal with my actual words or my argument; they only seek to smear me as a person.
I don’t think Vuori has to deal with this.
All of this is to say: this is the hardest thing I have ever done. I am an old gal in a young woman’s game, saying things that a very unstable portion of the population does not want said. That portion has convinced or coerced a much larger group — most of the Left, if not all of it — that “trans” is the civil rights issue of our time and that some kind of genocide is underway, even as the number of people identifying as trans has exploded. Some genocide.
Now a tiny brand is having massive cultural impact, wresting the culture back with the same force it was taken from us. The activist letter people and the general Left are crying and raging because they are used to getting their way, and they aren’t getting it anymore.
They are men in dresses and lipstick who have enlisted liberal women as their handmaidens and convinced those women to surrender their own rights to privacy, safety, fairness, and equal opportunity.
Not anymore.
We are making it cool to say the most obviously true thing on earth: men and women are different.
Everyone knows this; it should not be this hard.
But it is. And we are not stopping.
If you are not willing to die on a hill for free speech and children, do you even have a hill?
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Jennifer Sey is the CEO of XX-XY Athletics. She is an author, filmmaker, and retired national champion gymnast.
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