When Zdenek Koubek walked into an office job in Prague in 1935, he braced himself for a familiar fear: ostracization by his colleagues. For the first time, he was showing up presenting as his authentic, masculine self. It’s a moment familiar to many transgender people, seared into your brain as you navigate coming out to the world and being who you actually are. But for almost everyone else, it’s private. For Koubek, it was relentlessly covered in the global press—in a society where, until a lawyer granted him a change of birth certificate, he could be arrested for “cross-dressing” for donning pants and a men’s coat.
When Zdenek Koubek walked into an office job in Prague in 1935, he braced himself for a familiar fear: ostracization by his colleagues. For the first time, he was showing up presenting as his authentic, masculine self. It’s a moment familiar to many transgender people, seared into your brain as you navigate coming out to the world and being who you actually are. But for almost everyone else, it’s private. For Koubek, it was relentlessly covered in the global press—in a society where, until a lawyer granted him a change of birth certificate, he could be arrested for “cross-dressing” for donning pants and a men’s coat.
A year earlier, Koubek had become a national icon winning a gold medal in the 800-meter—not in the Olympics but in the Women’s World Games, a rival event that allowed women to compete in events that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) would not. But for Koubek, who in modern terms would be labeled an intersex person assigned female at birth, the victory wracked him with guilt as he felt he was an imposter in women’s events despite society labeling him as one. His story and many others are chronicled in Michael Waters’s new book, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, which dives deep into the trans individuals who disrupted attempts to strictly define gender at the Olympics.
Despite current conventions, sport was not always policed the same way it is now. Even after some federations spent decades using tests to determine someone’s gender, the rise in visibility of trans and intersex athletes has prompted federations to once again explicitly define who is eligible for which gender categories. Athletes such as Caster Semenya—a runner from South Africa whose leaked private medical information determined her to be intersex—have been caught in this fight over who federations determine fits in the male and female categories.
Koubek and other athletes profiled in The Other Olympians would be undeniably categorized as intersex or transmasculine by today’s standards—identified by others as female at birth but identifying as men themselves. Meanwhile, the non-cisgender athletes who draw the most scrutiny today are transfeminine, identified as male at birth but identifying as women themselves. The trans men of the 1930s were depicted as being cheats trying to enter women’s competitions for their own advantage. The trans women of the 2020s are being depicted as cheats trying to enter women’s competitions for their own advantage.
Yet the idea that gender has to be tested did not arise out of nowhere—it was one driven by sports administrators of the 1930s with distinctly dubious politics.
The Other Olympians centers on the stories of these queer athletes, a time when we have much more understanding about transgender identities and those same athletes’ access to medical and social transitions. What is striking, however, is the difference many of these trans athletes received in the media compared with the attention many get today. Society at large was surprisingly accepting of the malleability of gender, according to media reports the book details. But the officials in charge were determined to enforce their own hard boundaries.
“It was just a small handful of officials who felt threatened by the idea that athletes could transition, then were like, ‘Oh, we have to do something about it,’” Waters told Foreign Policy. “And they didn’t really seem to know what they were doing and just decided that they had to do something.”
Koubek struggled with his victory in the Women’s World Games and almost considered publicly returning his medal during the event given his struggles with his own gender identity. It’s the reverse of the often pushed, if evidence-less, notion today that athletes are supposedly subverting gender binaries in the pursuit of victory. Athletes such as former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines have even gone as far to sue sport organizations for letting transgender athletes compete alongside them. Other cisgender athletes have vocalized support for barring trans athletes on similar grounds.
Koubek was so concerned with his place in the sporting landscape that he eschewed all forms of celebration of his accomplishments, seeking instead to ensure that others benefited. His actions represent the Olympic ideal of fair play and equal competition—in contrast to the sport officials.
Starting with the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, sport officials began to embrace the notion that sex testing was vital to create a level playing field in elite sport. The stories that prompted these officials to take action would be unrecognizable in today’s cultural landscape.
Being an elite athlete requires immense discipline and control over your own body, forming it to the highest standards in your sport. That kind of dedication toward changing and adapting your own figure is something many transgender people innately relate to. Yet instead of embracing how trans athletes bridge the gender divide with agency, sport officials viewed them as a threat, even if they wanted to compete in the gender they identified as.
Notably, most transgender sport bans these days allow transmasculine athletes an opportunity to seek an exemption to take testosterone as part of their transition without any sort of other medicalization needed to “prove” their gender. Testosterone is one of the most commonly known banned substances but a necessary part of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for transmasculine athletes. Sport bodies have deemed that for transmasculine athletes, taking testosterone as part of transition is fundamentally different from its use to doping
Meanwhile, transfeminine athletes, in an increasing amount of sports, are required to medicalize themselves to levels deemed passable by cisgender sport officials, many of whom are cisgender men. As part of transfeminine HRT, many trans women take a combination of estrogen and testosterone suppressants while being carefully monitored by a doctor—ideally. However, sport bodies have taken that further, declaring limits to the amount of testosterone in which transfeminine athletes can have in their bodies, even if it is not what their bodies would regularly be producing while on HRT. This means instead of just pursuing a medical transition, transfeminine athletes need to conform their endocrine system to specific ranges set by sport officials.
Two officials, American Avery Brundage and Swede Sigfrid Edstrom, were key to defining gender at the Olympics. Edstrom for many years before World War II led the International Association of Athletics Federations (now known as World Athletics) and used his political maneuvering to bring the Women’s World Games under his purview. His main ally was Brundage, the head of the American Olympic Committee, a precursor to the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, who successfully blocked a boycott movement aimed at stopping U.S. participation at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany.
Increasingly working with German sport officials close to the Nazi regime, Edstrom and Brundage rose to the top of power in the Olympic world and introduced regimes of sex testing and medical certification. Both eventually assumed the Presidency of the IOC, and their reactionary gender politics still define many of the norms today.
“I do really believe after researching this history that where we’re at today was not inevitable, but I think sex testing has become kind of an intrinsic part of how the Olympics worked for so long that it can kind of feel like it’s just how sports works,” Waters told Foreign Policy.
As sport federations such as World Rugby and World Athletics seek to limit transfeminine athlete participation, The Other Olympians seeks to showcase queer history in sport that has been around since before many modern practices were in place.
One area where more scholarship could be useful is the highlighting of transfeminine, or potentially transfeminine, athletes in the 1930s and how they navigated the changing sporting landscape. Did they, too, wish to compete as their authentic selves but hid their desires? But discrimination against trans women in the 1930s was even tighter than against trans men.
“I think my big thing is, like we’re really seeing now with all these anti-trans policies, how queer history is not linear and how it’s not a linear story of progress,” Waters said about what surprised him the most from researching The Other Olympians.
Sports have always been inherently political. So are our notions of gender. Intersex and trans people blur simple binaries in challenging ways. Those political decisions impact who gets to participate in the upper echelons of competition. These decisions impact sports all the way down to the grassroots levels, as federations and national governing bodies take their cues from the IOC, where the latest policy has allowed each international federation to set its own rules.
For example, British rowing has set a policy in which only women assigned female at birth can compete, while transfeminine athletes must compete in a newly created open category, othering them and separating them from main competitions. This policy is in line with the current British government’s view of gender and identity, but notably it is very different from the World Rowing policy that allows trans athletes to compete in the gender they identify with restrictions.
Or, in other words, as Waters said, “We can see the direct line between what happened in 1936 and what we have today.”
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