While the 2024 Olympics are now underway in Paris, it was three years ago in Tokyo when the first openly trans or nonbinary athletes competed at the games. Canadian soccer player Quinn won gold and posted on Instagram, “I feel sad knowing there were Olympians before me unable to live their truth because of the world.” The stories of some of those athletes — from nearly a century ago — are the subject of a new book called The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports. In it, author Michael Waters also chronicles how the 1936 Berlin Games, which the Nazis famously organized, ushered in decades of testing and surveillance around gender.
The central character in the book is Zdeněk Koubek, a track and field athlete who was born in Czechoslovakia before World War I and raised as a girl. Waters explains that Koubek began questioning his identity at a young age, and his interest in sports began when he got invited to watch a friend compete at a track meet. He was impressed by the way the athletes moved, and started playing sports in the late 1920s.
Then at the 1934 Women's World Games, he won gold in the 800-meter dash, setting a world record. Afterward, he took a break from sports to address long-running questions about his identity and future goals, Waters says.
“He begins seeing a doctor in the fall of 1935 — about the possibility of transitioning gender. And they agree that they're going to perform a series of different medical operations on him, and he can start living as a man going forward, which is what he stated in his memoir he's always wanted.”
Those procedures were rare at the time, but when Koubek announced publicly that he was going to transition, he didn’t face backlash. “It was more just questions about what is possible,” Waters says.
Zdeněk Koubek’s application for an ID card, 1948. Courtesy of the National Archives of the Czech Republic.
In January 1936, an op-ed argued that Koubek was a fraud who cheated when he played women’s sports. The op-ed’s author was Dr. Wilhelm Knoll, a registered Nazi and the leader of a group of sports physicians who advised the International Olympic Committee and other sports federations.
“Then he also starts firing off letters to the different sports federations, arguing that they should also adopt these medical exams in women's sports,” Waters explains. “He doesn't say why they should do this, who they should be weeding out, even what the exam should consist of. … Most of the sports federations don't respond to him. But the track and field federation, which today is known as World Athletics, they are the ones to take him up on it. … That was really the beginnings of a lot of these policies. And it's during the Berlin Olympics in August 1936, when the track and field federation passes this first policy that allows for there to be medical exams of women athletes.”
The tests didn’t apply to men.
Adolf Hitler and Henri de Baillet-Latour enter the Olympic Stadium in 1936. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0.
Spectators give the Nazi salute during one of the medal ceremonies as the medalists' flags fly above, 1936. Credit: Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0.
Plus, Waters points out that track and field — more so than other sports — had intense anxieties around women athletes.
“A lot of the early Olympic events for women were … tennis and golf, which … you had to be a member of a club, you had to pay a lot of money for equipment in order to participate. So these were sports that were really associated with the upper class, and with the white upper class in particular. And track and field was just more accessible to a wider cross section of people. … And I think that's one reason why there is this really pervasive idea in the 20s and 30s that women track and field athletes are less feminine, are embodying this idea of masculinity. And I think that is one reason why there's such fixation on track and field.”
He adds, “And then ultimately, all of these policies are the result of their bureaucrats and their governing structures. And it is also just possible that the specific makeup of people in track and field … in the 1930s was just more amenable to this idea of sex testing.”
After track, other sports adopted these types of exams, and they took off during the 1960s. That largely had to do with the Cold War, Water says.
“There was, the U.S. side, lots of anxiety about masculine women from the USSR who are winning. Also, I mean, this idea of sex testing really gets conflated with anti-doping procedures in the public consciousness. … To the general public, there's this just vague notion of cheating that begins to spread more widely. And I think the Cold War fears are really what makes the IOC step in and say, ‘Okay, we're gonna regulate this for the first time.’”
From 1936 to the 1950s, athletes had to strip down and show whether their bodies fit certain criteria. Sports officials didn’t clearly outline what they were looking for. By the end of the 1960s, chromosome testing was used. Then by the late 20th century, it became hormone tests.
Finally, in 2021, the IOC stopped making overarching prescriptions around sex testing, and left it up to individual federations governing each sport, Waters says. They also asked each federation to include trans and intersex women in sports.
However, Waters points out, “I think the general trend in the last couple of years has actually been to get more restrictive, and to really eliminate, in some of these cases, a path for trans women and a lot of intersex women, even cis women with high testosterone levels, from competing.”
He also notes that sports officials have never considered the humanity of the athletes themselves. “To even get to the point where you are possibly going to the Olympics, you have to be so incredibly talented, it takes years and years of work. … And this idea that we would draw this arbitrary line and say, ‘You are not fitting our definition of women, therefore you can't compete’ — to me feels a little untenable.”
At the end of the book, Waters writes, “By zeroing in on how sex has been constructed, I hoped to dispel the idea that ‘sex’ was ever a stable category. This line between ‘male’ and ‘female’ was something that top sports officials needed to invent.”
So should all sexes compete together?
He responds, “I don't totally know what the answer is personally, and I probably am not the person to make that decision. One thing I'll say from looking at the history is: More sports than I think we would have imagined were initially conceived of as mixed gender sports. … Figure skating … [was] originally mixed gender … in the early 1900s. And a lot of the early winners were men. And what happened is actually, in the early 1900s, a woman entered figure skating and won silver, and shocked the public in a way where they actually divided up sports into male and female categories because a woman had won. … This doesn't hold true for all sports, certainly, but I do think these things don't go in the direction that we always think of them. There's just a lot more nuance here than some of the discussion makes it seem like.”