THE OTHER OLYMPIANS

How transgender and gender-nonconforming athletes changed the face of early-20th-century sports history.

In his debut book, journalist Waters traces the histories of acclaimed European athletes who defied preset sexual boundaries and publicly transitioned their genders. Set against the backdrop of World War II, amid Hitler’s rise to power and the excitement of the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, the distinguished Olympians the author profiles were all assigned female at birth but struggled with emerging gender dysphoria. Zdeněk Koubek, a Czech athlete, was born female, but “eventually he’d understand himself not to be,” as he initially rejected and then developed a love of competitive sprinting. Waters focuses mostly on Koubek’s journey toward gender self-expression, which coincided with other athletes—e.g., self-described “tomboy” Mark Weston, an English javelin, discus, and shot-putting champion, and eminent cyclist Willy de Bruyn. Waters seamlessly integrates several other celebrated athletes into his report and cites the many challenges facing trans competitors, including the Nazi takeover of the queer community in 1930s Germany, where “trans and intersex people were judged to be ‘asocial’ [and] people on the margins of gender and sexuality were arrested, imprisoned, and, at times, dispatched to their deaths.” The bureaucratization of gender in sports manifested in the 1936 creation of Olympic sex-testing policies as a method to keep transgender athletes from participating in competitive sports. Waters further addresses these gender bias regulations in his conclusion, revisiting the life of a fully transitioned Koubek, who “dumped all the medals he’d won” in protest of verification testing. Densely factual, impeccably researched, and written with dramatic flair, this book intensively probes gender bias in the Olympics amid the rise of European midcentury fascism and the epic challenges to gender essentialism.

A significant deep dive into the queer historical evolution and significance of transgender athletes in organized sports.