Czechoslovakian track star Zdeněk Koubek’s tenure as an athlete included, among other accolades, a gold medal and world-record time in the 800-meter dash at the 1934 Women’s World Games. But Koubek’s rise from European fame to global fame came after he publicly announced in 1935 that he was transitioning to live life as a man, and would subsequently compete in men’s sports. Around the same time, a celebrated British field athlete, Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he also was now living as a man and retiring from sport for good. Koubek and Weston’s stories were reported in newspapers worldwide and, for the most part, in turn were celebrated by a supportive public who seemed openminded to a vast spectrum of gender and identity.
In The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, journalist Michael Waters tells the true stories of Weston, Koubek, and other trans and intersex athletes with nuance and care. Through rigorous archival work, a compelling narrative structure that foregrounds the people behind policy, and with a keen sense for the ways history has echoed into our present day, Waters illuminates the way that Koubek and Weston’s stories were weaponized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to fuel a moral panic around gender that prompted invasive, discriminatory policies and soon began to shape the future of sport as we know it.
In our current landscape, one in which trans athletes are under attack, the U.S. is in the lead-up to an important election, and the 2024 Olympic Games are underway, The Other Olympians feels eerily prescient and deeply important. I had the opportunity to speak with Michael Waters on the phone about what history can teach us about living in the present, the importance of archives, the rise in gender surveillance, and more.
Jacqueline Alnes: Can you talk about how track and field as a lens enabled you to write with such depth and nuance about fascism, queerness, gender, racism, and more?
Michael Waters: I am a queer historian. I followed queer history into the sports world. I got obsessed with the stories of Zdeněk Koubek and Mark Weston who are these two athletes who played women’s sports and each separately in 1935 and 1936 transitioned gender and began living as men. To have such visible examples of any notable person, an athlete, in that era, transitioning gender, it surprised me even as a researcher of queer history. Seeing the public’s reaction to that and the sense of curiosity about them and these possibilities of male and female, I was intrigued by how prominent these two were and then how they were forgotten.
When I started to uncover more, it all became wrapped up in track and field. Because of the nature of track and field and the accessibility, a lot more athletes could do it, across class and race backgrounds especially. That wasn’t the angle I went in expecting. This sport, for an array of reasons, has become a central vector. You see both the potential of what sports could have been if we had gone down a different road and you can also see the origins of a lot of surveillance apparatuses around gender and a lot of these anxieties around women’s sports in general. When you look at someone like Caster Semenya, you can see how these policies trickle down today.
JA: I thought about Caster Semenya, who was forced to undergo sex testing after her victory in the 2009 World Championships and whose right to race the 800 was taken away from her by new legislation issued by the IAAF, while reading your book, because you highlight, among many other things, the way that gender policing can serve as a cover for racial discrimination. Could you talk more about the intersections of racism, sexism, and classism that coalesced in the creation of these discriminatory policies?
MW: I don’t think it was inevitable that we had to go down this road of gender surveillance in the first place. When you look at the public reaction to these athletes who were transitioning, it’s not a one-to-one to today—one of the athletes was retired, one was going to transition to men’s sports—but there was this real sense of interest from the public in seeing categories of male and female being more permeable. You saw in sports magazines and major newspapers there would be these op-eds saying that everyone is a bit of a balance of male and female and usually one overtakes the other, but sometimes not. There was this idea that these categories are not so entrenched. I think there could have been a world in which we didn’t get to this point. Even when those first policies were passed in the 1930s, there was plenty of critique of them from within the sports world; it wasn’t inevitable that we would just be doing this same thing for 90 years. When you look at this long history, what you see is this failure of a lot of sports officials to think about the spectrum of the body and gender that we all exist on and to also prioritize the humanity of athletes.
What officials have done is construct their own definition of femaleness and push anyone out who doesn’t belong on these very arbitrary points, while making it seem like it’s a really objective thing that they are doing. Through history, you see that the way that male and female have been defined by sports bodies has changed from really cruel strip tests, like physical examinations, to chromosomal tests, to this grab-bag of different tests depending on the federations. Throughout sports history, this has been white sports officials, mostly men. At least in the early history, anyone who threatened this idea of upper class, white, European femininity was scrutinized and in some cases not allowed to participate in the women’s category. The women athletes who have been targeted and accused of not fitting these categories of womanhood have been disproportionately women of color and working-class white women.
JA: Weston, after transitioning, retired from sport while Koubek expressed a desire to compete in the men’s category, as aligned with his identity. Their stories were used by IAAF officials as evidence of “fraud” in women’s sports even though neither Koubek or Weston expressed a desire to compete in women’s sports post-transition. You write, “Sex testing, from the start, was never about an actual threat to women’s sports. It was always about the perception of a threat.” Could you talk more about that?
MW: If one could move between these different categories, sports officials at the time worried it would threaten the categories themselves. Instead of trying to reconceive of these male and female categories, see them as permeable, and see them as being imperfect, it became about restriction. It’s that perception of a threat that you’re referring to.
These policies were passed before there was even a real idea of who officials were trying to go after. You see that even in the way these policies were worded. In 1936, when the Track and Field officials created this policy, they didn’t spell out ‘these are the women who are allowed to compete in this category’ and ‘these are the women who are not.’ They just said anyone who drew questions of a physical nature would be physically examined and their status would be decided. It left open the door to disqualifying a lot of different kinds of people and different kinds of women because they didn’t know who they were trying to weed out. It was a panic that came before any real concrete idea of what it even stood for. I think that’s why we’ve seen it change so much and be used against so many different kinds of athletes in the intervening decades. It’s obtuse, almost intentionally.
JA: I watched Nikki Hiltz, a trans runner, win the Olympic Trials 1500m last night, and thought about a quote they gave to the NY Times:
“Right now, competing in the women’s category still feels OK for me and my gender and where I’m at with that journey. But the second it doesn’t…I’m going to choose the relationship with myself before my relationship with track and field.”
This reminded me of Koubek and Weston’s psychological distress as they privately wrestled with their gender identities and their desire to compete in a sport they loved. What might it look like to truly allow for a full spectrum of gender identity? What could sport be?
Officials have constructed their own definition of femaleness and pushed [people out based on] these very arbitrary points, while making it seem objective.
MW: From a historical vantage point, what struck me while doing this research was that there were several different Olympic sports that were originally conceived of as mixed-gender sports. Officials instituted male-female binaries after women won those sports. In the early 1900s, figure skating was a mixed sport and this woman, Madge Syers, won silver. She was the first woman to medal highly in this competition. As a result, figure skating decided to split into male and female categories. More recently, at the Olympics in the skeet shooting category, a woman won and set a new world record, and the governing body first stopped allowing women to compete and eventually split it into male and female categories.
I mention those stories just because I think I’m not the best person to come up with the path forward, but I think it’s easy to have amnesia about the past and assume that male and female categories have always been as rigid as they are today. When you look at the history, you see that there was a lot more possibility. The history itself is more complicated than we tend to remember from our present vantage point.
JA: The perspective of what has been helps to clarify the present. You mention that history didn’t have to turn out the way it did. Something that struck me in your book was learning about sexology in the early 1900s in Germany.
MW: It’s easy to forget now, but the 1920s and 1930s, in a lot of major cities, was this moment of queer potential. In Germany, you had Magnus Hirschfeld, this sexologist who had this clinic especially serving people who would probably identify as trans today. He gave them medical care, IDs so they could live under their own gender, name changes, etc. You had this center of health and research in Berlin, but then when you look globally, there were all sorts of queer communities popping up. There’s this great book called Gay New York focusing on how there were incredibly visible queer communities in New York City in the 1920s. There were drag shows in Harlem attended by non-queer people. Even if you weren’t in a major city, you were probably reading newspapers that talked about these strange things that were happening around what we would now call gender. The local newspapers would be filled with stories about people who moved between these different categories or in some cases got their name changed after transitioning. These stories would sometimes be written as scandalous curiosities but it was in the ether that these categories of male and female were not as fixed as we might think. There were these early attempts at explaining queerness to a public.
One of my favorite discoveries while researching this book was Sexology, which is a kind of pseudoscientific, tabloid-y, science magazine from the 1930s that talked about sex, sexuality, gender, for a wide public. Its idea was to make academic literature more accessible to regular people. Some of the stuff it published I don’t think would have appeared in any academic journal because it just seemed made up, but what you see in a lot of the articles they write is a real attempt to wrestle with queerness in these different ways. They would have articles about whether to be a bisexual, whether gay people can live happy lives, and new innovations in medical gender transition surgeries. Even more interesting than the articles themselves was this Q&A section in Sexology where readers could write in with their private questions about their bodies or their sex life, so you get tons of questions about masturbation, for instance, that people didn’t have space for in the 1930s, but then you also got a lot of questions about queerness and about people who were attracted to the same sex or people who were interested in living as a gender other than the one they had been assigned at birth. In the 1930s you see this real questioning and public engagement with these queer ideas and queer identities and communities.
I think it’s easy now to assume that queer history is this linear story and like there’s this turning point at Stonewall and that maybe there’s this forward path of progress, but when you look at the early 20th century, there was potential for something else that got lost.
JA: When the Nazi Party took over, there was a rise in surveillance. People who were not perceived to fit a very narrow identity, a “normative, white, non-Jewish heterosexuality,” as you write, experienced real threats of violence. How did the political climate shape queer possibilities during this time?
I think it’s easy to have amnesia about the past and assume that male and female categories have always been as rigid as they are today.
MW: There’s all of this queer stuff happening in the press, in the public, in the sports world, in the early 1930s, and I think it’s probably not a coincidence that a lot of that starts to disappear in Europe because of this rise in fascism. We even see that with Koubek himself. He went from being this very visible person who had transitioned gender in 1936 to essentially disappearing off the map by the end of the 1930s. We are limited in our archival knowledge about him, but I imagine there is some intentionality there, which is that he’s from the Czech Republic, and by the end of the 1930s the Nazis had taken over the Czech Republic. Koubek was able to get a driver’s license that identified him as a man and he married a woman in 1940. He was white, he was not Jewish, he was able to pass. I think you see a lot of this really visible queerness go underground for the sake of survival by the end of the ‘30s and it would take a few decades for that to come back.
JA: In terms of thinking about the way history unfolded, I kept being drawn to thinking about Avery Brundage’s role in the Olympics and in the creation of harmful policy. As you write, Brundage was an American IOC member who seems to have willfully ignored the rampant discrimination and violence carried out by the Nazi Party. He supported German IOC members despite their ties to the Nazi regime, chose to believe propaganda ensuring that Jewish athletes would be included in the games, and held his own desire for power above all else. What can we learn from studying a person like this?
MW: He is one of the most influential IOC officials of the modern Olympics. He became president of the IOC and was one of the longest serving presidents. He continued the same ideology up until the end. He is an important figure even beyond the contours of this book. A reason I became so interested in him and telling his story is because I think a lot of bureaucracy of different kinds, including sports bureaucracy, are intentionally boring and intentionally faceless. I don’t think most people can name current members of the IOC, for instance. What was striking to me about this story is the policies that were passed were the result not of a bureaucracy composed of people who had really deep, intellectual, humanistic discussions about gender in order to make policy. In the 1930s it was policy crafted by very specific individuals who had their very specific biases, most of whom were not just white men, but white men who came from the European aristocratic class or who had very successful businesses who could afford to travel the world for these types of memberships. Many of them, like you said, had sympathy for fascism and for the Nazis. Brundage was not the only member of the IOC who was writing about the Nazis in this era.
By disentangling who is a part of these bureaucracies and who is creating these policies that are carried out, we can actually see why different policy is so flawed. You can extend that out to our era too in different ways. When you look at who is serving in these organizations and what they care about and who they care about, you do see a lot more bias in the process and it does make more sense why a policy could be so exclusionary, and so out of step with where we should be heading. Bureaucracies are a product of people.
JA: You wrote Brundage so well. It seems like he never really examined his own power or his own beliefs.
In the 1930s you see this real questioning and public engagement with these queer ideas and queer identities and communities.
MW: Brundage feels so well-drawn because he has one of the most extensive personal archives I’ve ever seen. There are hundreds and hundreds of boxes filled with correspondence from throughout his career. I quote a lot in the book that doesn’t make him look very good at all, but it’s interesting that, up until the end, he thought that somehow it would make him look good? The fact that he saved that material and didn’t destroy it makes this history possible.
I don’t know how much we would see that today, an influential sports official who was so clearly wrong about a lot of things, saying, perhaps delusionally, I’m going to keep all of this stuff for historians. The trend now is to burn it.
JA: What’s something that you’ll take away from engaging with this subject matter for so long?
MW: How important a lot of lower-brow magazines like Sexology really are in understanding queer history. There wasn’t a queer media landscape in the 1920s and 1930s. If you look at the NY Times archives, there are lots of traces of queerness, but not as much richness as when you look at the tabloid magazines. Where queer people did get covered in a lot of depth were these magazines already considered to be a little low-brow. When you get more creative about the sources that you look at, you see a lot more history. I think it’s telling what we decide to save. What kinds of publications we deem worthy to save informs a lot about whose history we can end up telling decades later.