Jennifer Sey has been at Levi’s Stadium more than either of the quarterbacks who will play there at Sunday’s Super Bowl in Santa Clara, California.
As a marketing executive — and later global brand president — of the iconic jeans brand founded during California’s gold rush, she was there when the home of the San Francisco 49ers first opened with the Levi’s name, and she’s been to more football games and concerts at the stadium than she can count.
But Sey, a mother of four who now lives in Denver, famously parted company with Levi’s in 2022, after two years of speaking out against school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. She had worked for the company for 23 years, and to this day remains a Levi’s enthusiast: She still owns hundreds of Levi’s brand clothes, including a pair of jeans she bought at a San Francisco thrift store decades ago.
But Levi’s represents only about half Sey’s wardrobe today: The other half is XX-XY Athletics, a brand she founded in the spring of 2024. The company was born out of necessity, she said in an interview with the Deseret News.
After appearing on Fox News and other conservative news outlets, Sey became seen as aligned with the conservative right even though she’d been a Democrat for most of her life. A Stanford University graduate, she had interviews for other executive jobs after leaving Levi’s, but found companies reluctant to hire her; once, a human-resources manager asked if she would apologize for her views, and Sey refused.
Her Substack is called “Sey Everything” because that’s been Sey’s MO throughout her life. She has said, out loud and in public, whatever she thinks on the sexual and psychological abuse of female gymnasts (having been an elite gymnast herself and having written a book and helped produce a documentary on the subject), and on transgender athletes competing in women’s sports and a host of other hot-button cultural issues.
On social media, she’s listing all the companies that have rejected advertising for XX-XY, and she has enlisted other athletes and cultural crusaders like Riley Gaines to represent her brand. And then there’s COVID, school closures and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
In a conversation with the Deseret News, Sey, 56, talked about why she considered COVID school closures “morally abhorrent,” why she doesn’t believe that a “parallel economy” of the right is needed to compete with left, what concerns her most about Newsom, and why she’s now a registered Republican — albeit one with concerns.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Deseret News: Tell us a little bit about XX-XY Athletics and how it came to be.
Jennifer Sey: It was in 2023 that I had the idea. And to be honest, it came out of necessity. After a really illustrious career in corporate America — I worked for one of the best known brands in the world — I was pretty much completely ousted from corporate America forever because of the stance I’d taken during COVID, advocating for the opening of public schools and the removal of restrictions, specifically for children. I was interviewing in 2023 for a CEO job, and I’d gone through about nine different interviews, and they’d gone quite well, and then the last person, the HR representative on the board, started the interview with “Will you apologize for what you have done?”
And what I had done, in her mind, was say that public schools should be open during COVID, and even though I’d been proven absolutely correct at that point, it didn’t matter. I’d proven myself to be disobedient, I’d veered from the script that was given to me, and it was clear to me at that point there was no room for me in corporate America.
So I started to think about what I was going to do next and came up with this idea for my own brand that combined my own athletic background and my experience in brand building and the fashion industry, and my willingness to say true but quite controversial things. There was also a practical reason for choosing athletic wear — it is the fastest growing segment in the clothing industry.
DN: The XX-XY Athletics website says that you don’t want to make “so-so products for the parallel economy.” Can you talk about why you don’t like the idea of an economy for and by conservatives?
JS: We’re the majority. Eighty to 90% of Americans agree with us (on the issue of biological men competing with women). And that’s why we should not be parallel. That is a way to minimize the message and delegitimize the message of this brand, which is one athletic apparel brand that is actually lined up with the majority on common sense. ... That’s why I don’t like that phrase. I don’t accept it. We’re the mainstream.
There are people who choose parallel economy brands, and that’s fine, and they can choose us. But brands that are lined up with more conservative values — that’s still half the country. You shouldn’t accept being sidelined and delegitimized. It’s a mass market opportunity. The view that should be sidelined and delegitimized is the idea that men can compete in women’s sports and it’s somehow fair.
DN: On social media, you’ve been calling out news outlets that have rejected your advertisements. What are their concerns?
JS: Our ads are rejected by the mainstream media which is so captured and enamored by this insane ideology. We were kicked off of TikTok almost the day we started advertising back in 2024. Recently, as we’ve grown and pursued more high-profile media placements because we have more money to spend, we’re trying to take that message mainstream and not be relegated to conservative channels and podcasts only, but we keep getting rejected, or if they’re willing to accept it, they want to whitewash or minimize the message. We have this ad, “Backwards,” and it basically articulates that this year the Supreme Court is going to decide if men can compete in women’s sports.
We communicate the momentousness of this moment, and we say, “The Supreme Court will decide if men can compete in women’s sports.” The networks have said they will run it if we say “transwomen” instead of men. And I won’t do that. This is about men. Using their language, saying transwomen, is what got us into this situation in the first place.
But we’ll keep fighting. In the past few days, two medical associations have issued new guidance, saying there is no good solid evidence for mutilating surgeries for minors ... and we’ve had a plaintiff win a $2 million award in Westchester County, a very left-leaning county in New York, so I think these are all strong indications that this ideology is crumbling. But we still have a long way to go.
DN: You have called school closures during COVID “morally abhorrent” and wrote a book about what happened to you during this time. What shaped your thinking on this?
JS: I started commenting on Facebook in March of 2020, and I was very careful and anodyne; I was saying, are we sure this is a good idea? I moved from Facebook to Twitter in April, because I was getting such pushback from friends and family on Facebook, and I thought maybe there were more nuanced takes on Twitter, which was a stupid assumption. I learned quickly you find community there among people you don’t know in real life, and you can talk directly to experts.
I knew once the schools closed, we were not going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle. My husband and I had children in schools in San Francisco and we could see the harms that were being done in real time. The playgrounds were also closed in San Francisco, for 10 months.
I always say I get myself in trouble because of my naivety. I see a thing and start talking about it without thinking what the repercussions will be. I didn’t quite realize in March and April (of 2020) how much the deck was stacked against me. I thought if I cited data and facts and spoke reasonably and calmly that I might be able to convince people in my community to push back on the school closures.
I focused on the restrictions to children, even though I was concerned about all of the lockdown restrictions, because I thought we could all agree that children should not bear this burden, that we care about children. But what I’ve learned time and time again — and we can go back to my time in gymnastics — is we don’t put children first. And we don’t prioritize their well-being as a culture. In fact, sometimes our policies create tremendous harm for children. That’s been the through-line in my life. All the time I’ve gotten in trouble was for taking a stand for children, because somebody has to, and frankly, I wish somebody had taken that stand for me, when I was a child.
DN: You have spoken frankly about your experiences as a child athlete, beginning to compete in gymnastics at age 7. And yet you remain a big proponent of sports for children.
JS: I’m a huge proponent of sports, particularly for little girls. The facts are so clear about the benefits. I think about everything I learned in sports — the discipline, the ability to persevere, the ability to lose and get back up again. Those are invaluable skills. That said, I think there’s a really bright line between coaching and abuse. I was not allowed to eat, I was weighed twice a day, I was called a fat pig, I was forced to train on a broken ankle. … We were told “lose 5 pounds by tomorrow, I don’t care how you do it.” That’s child abuse.
I don’t think there’s any world in which a sane human being describes that as just tough coaching. Everybody knows that’s abuse. ... None of that is necessary and we lose more athletes than we gain with that sort of treatment. I hope it’s getting better now. There have certainly been some high-profile firings. But culture change is very, very difficult, and this has been the culture for 50 years in the sport.
DN: In the past, you have described yourself as “politically homeless.” Is that still the case?
JS: I’m slightly homeless. I was a registered independent for probably four or five years. But after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, I registered as a Republican. I was disgusted by the reaction from the left, and I didn’t want the left to think of me, or people like me, as getable. I think they think of independents as getable, and I didn’t want anything to do with them. I will admit, there are things I observe on the right that make me very uncomfortable right now, so that’s why I say I might be a touch politically homeless, but as of right now, I’m a registered Republican.
DN: Finally, can we talk about Gavin Newsom? Did you reach out to him when you were in California, or did he ever reach out to you?
JS: No, but I definitely tweeted about him. I was very critical of him. I think his policies were the worst in the country and other states followed his policies so they had disastrous effects beyond California.
I am proud that I never liked Gavin, even when I was a Democrat.
I will say this, I have been in a room with him. He spoke at Levi’s once, and I went to another event where he was in conversation with Cory Booker. And I will say, he does have charisma. And I remember being struck by it, because I didn’t like him and yet I could see the charisma. Which is scary, because if you don’t know him well, and you don’t know the policies well, and you don’t know how he’s created all these problems in California, you might just find him charismatic and vote for him. But I don’t think he can be president. I think the policies and the impacts to California are too awful.