Jennifer Sey, the chief executive of the women’s sports apparel brand XX-XY Athletics, says running the company is the hardest thing she has ever done — harder than a gymnastics career that included a national championship and a broken femur at the World Championships. In a first-person essay published by The Daily Wire, Sey describes leading the brand as a gauntlet of death threats, open FBI investigations, and an unsettling confrontation at her own office.
Sey, 57, is a former elite gymnast who made her first national team at 11 and later won a national title. She went on to write a 2008 book about abuse in the sport and appeared in the Emmy-winning documentary “Athlete A.” She says that background — and a willingness to take unpopular positions — led her to start XX-XY Athletics at 55 rather than retire.
A life in the gym
Sey opens the essay by recounting a childhood defined by training. She made her first national team at 11, was training five or six hours a day by then, and moved away from home at 14 to join a nationally recognized club. She says the coaching turned meaner as the hours stretched longer. When she broke her ankle, she writes, her coaches pressed her doctor to remove the cast after just 10 days so she would not miss Nationals; she placed fifth in the country.
The following year she qualified for the World Championships in Montreal, where she fell in the final event and broke her femur. Nine months later she was national champion. That comeback, she writes, remains the most physically grueling thing she has ever done — more painful than giving birth to four children, two of them in her forties. The rush back also led to a broken ankle in her other leg, which she says she trained on while broken for two more years. At 57, she notes, that ankle no longer works the way it once did.
When she left the sport, Sey says she carried a “corrosive sense of failure” into her twenties and thirties. Despite the titles, she believed her coaches’ repeated insistence that she was garbage. It took 20 years, she writes, before she could publish “Chalked Up,” her account of the emotional and physical abuse she experienced inside those gyms. The backlash, she says, was immediate and broad: former teammates, coaches, USA Gymnastics, and governing bodies around the world called her a liar, a grifter, and a bitter ex-gymnast. She says she retreated briefly, canceling book readings over threats, then decided the attacks meant the problem was even worse than she had imagined.
She describes the sport as “rotten to the core,” with training protocols harmful to young girls and rampant sexual abuse. When the Larry Nassar abuse scandal broke, Sey writes that she was proven correct — but no one apologized. She says she welcomed former critics into the fight anyway, arguing it was always about protecting athletes rather than building herself up.
COVID, San Francisco, and the cost
During the pandemic, Sey says she opposed school closures from the start while living in deep-blue San Francisco. She writes that she was chased down the street and called a murderer for arguing on Twitter that schools should reopen. She recounts an incident in which a woman spat at her and said she would not care if Sey’s children died — a reaction Sey attributes to taking her four-year-old daughter, unmasked, to an empty beach.
The fallout, she says, cost her the city she loved, almost every friend she had, and a 30-year career. She calls the loss crushing but says she acted for the sake of children. “If you won’t die on a hill for free speech and children, do you even have a hill?” she writes.
Threats, an intruder, and an FBI file
Sey says the pushback she has faced for XX-XY Athletics — a brand built around the message that women’s sports are for women — exceeds anything she experienced advocating for young gymnasts or opposing COVID policies. She writes that she now has open FBI investigations stemming from threats to her life and her employees’ lives. These are not merely hostile messages, she says, but detailed descriptions of what people intend to do to her, her team, and their children.
She describes an incident last week in which a man walked into the company’s offices demanding a meeting with “Jennifer Sey.” The man was dirty, unkempt, and shaking, she writes. Sey was sitting with three staff members, and all four understood at the same moment, she says, that he meant them harm. Somehow the four women got him out of the building. She says an FBI contact told her to call 911 immediately, and later called to reassure her the man was likely not the person who typically harasses her by phone — a clarification Sey writes did nothing to calm her.
Sey believes the man was sent by people who hate her to frighten her: he knew her name but not her face. The tactic, she writes, worked. She was terrified he would show up at her home that night while she was alone with her daughter and her husband was out of town with their son. An acquaintance in private security sat outside her house for a few hours, then left her bear spray that still sits on her bedside table. She slept with one eye open all weekend, holding her daughter close.
She notes that everyone tells her to be careful, and asks what that even means, pointing to Charlie Kirk, who had round-the-clock security and was still murdered in public.
Beyond the usual startup pressures — cash management, courting investors, an unpredictable young business — Sey says she contends with people who want her dead, alongside hit pieces that she says intensify as the brand’s profile grows and rarely engage with her actual argument. She contrasts her situation with that of established athletic brands: “I don’t think Vuori has to deal with this.”
A culture fight
Sey casts the broader fight in sweeping terms. She describes herself as an older woman in a young woman’s game, saying things a small but unstable slice of the population does not want said. That slice, she argues, has convinced or coerced much of the political left into treating trans issues as the civil rights cause of the era, and to believe a genocide is underway, even as the number of people identifying as trans has grown. “Some genocide,” she writes.
She contends a tiny brand is having outsized cultural impact, wrestling back the culture with the same force it was taken. She criticizes activists and the wider left for raging because, in her view, they are no longer getting their way. She describes men in dresses and lipstick enlisting liberal women as handmaidens and persuading them to surrender their own rights to privacy, safety, fairness, and equal opportunity.
The brand’s core message, as she puts it, is that men and women are different — something she says everyone already knows and that should not be so hard to say. She closes by returning to her central question about which hills are worth dying on.
Sey’s essay is a first-person account published by The Daily Wire. It reflects her own characterization of events, her business, and her political opponents; the claims about the motives of those who threaten her, including her belief that the office intruder was sent by people who hate her, are her own assertions rather than established facts.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/leading-xx-xy-athletics-is-the-hardest-thing-ive-ever-done