“The Other Olympians:” Transgender Athletes in the Nazi Era

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: And when it comes to gender and sex in sport, the conversation can often be fraught. At this year’s Games, trans athletes are subject to stricter rules and regulations than before. Though this may seem like a recent issue, it’s actually a topic that goes back to the 1930s. In his new book, “The Other Olympians,” historian Michael Waters details the stories of trans athletes who competed back then. And he joins Hari Sreenivasan to speak about the challenges they faced.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Michael Waters, thanks so much for joining us. You’ve got a new book out. And in the Olympic spirit here, it is called “The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness and the Making of Modern Sports.” And what’s interesting to me about it as, you know, a casual fan of the Olympics is when you think of 1936, the storyline you usually think of is Jesse Owens, there is in Berlin, being hosted by the Nazis, but you found the really fascinating alternate story that I’d never heard of. You talked about these two athletes, trans athletes, who were there at the time and they publicly transitioned. Tell me a little bit about the athletes that you profiled.

MICHAEL WATERS, AUTHOR, “THE OTHER OLYMPIANS”: Yes. So, I wrote about Zdenek Koubek, who is this Czech runner who won gold in this competition called the Women’s World Games, which was like a rival to the Olympics in the 1930s. His main sport — so he was assigned female at birth. He played in women’s sports before transitioning, and his main sport was the 800 meters, which was not available at the Olympics at the time, because there are very few sports for women at the Olympics, especially in track and field in the 1930s. And so, he wins gold at really the highest level of competition available to him in 1934, and he sets a new world record in the process. And, you know, he’s kind of like — he becomes this sort of like local sports celebrity in Czechoslovakia, where he’s, and perhaps throughout Europe. And essentially what happens is after winning gold, he steps away from sports for a bit, and he sort of decides to wrestle with these like questions he’s always had about his own self-identity. And so, after winning gold, he steps away from sports and he starts consulting a doctor about the possibility of transitioning. And he has these consultations and then he decides that going forward, he’s going to be living as a man. And then, in late November, 1935, he announces to the Czech press that, you know, he’s transitioning gender and living as a man and wants to play in men’s sports in the future. And a few days later, in early December, that news gets picked up globally, and it just becomes this really big international news story for several weeks. And then, eventually, you know, throughout, the whole of 1936 year when the Berlin Olympics happened, all talking about this athlete who transitioned gender. And so, Koubek was the first, but there — a few months later, there’s this other athlete who was a little bit less successful, but similarly was assigned female at birth, played in women’s sports. His name was Mark Weston. He was a British shot putter. And in May, 1936, so several months after Koubek transitioned he too gave this interview in which he said that he was living as a man. And so, you know, together, they really created this global news story in 1936, you know, that summer right ahead of the Olympics about, you know, just like the meaning of transition and of these categories of male and female, you know, themselves, which I think you saw the press talking about in this really interesting nuance way, really, for the first time.

SREENIVASAN: What was that coverage like? I mean, you know, it’s hard for us to imagine how the world was almost a hundred years ago, but how were people approaching the idea that someone who was born a woman who would want to be competing in men’s sports?

WATERS: Yes. So, I mean, the — so 1935 and 1936, when this was happening, you know, this was an era before there was a concept of gender as this like psychological socialized identity distinct from biological sex. And so, you know, when these athletes were written about, it was purely in terms of the body. But, you know, the mid-1930s are also kind of the end of this era of really visible queerness in a lot of cities in Europe, in the U.S. especially, and, you know, you had in Germany, which was, you know, right next door to Czechoslovakia, you had Magnus Hirschfeld, who was this really prominent sexologist who offered medical care to trans and intersex people in the 1920s and 1930s. And, you know, he helped to bring forward these ideas that, you know, perhaps there is a lot more to understand about the body and about what we call gender today and about transition themselves. And this is also an era where, like, you know, every few months there is a new discovery about the body and about sex and sexuality. And so, I think the public was quite primed to see — like — to like accept the idea that there was more than they generally understood about how, sort of, like, sex worked and how these categories of male and female worked. And what really struck me is that a lot of the coverage of Koubek and Weston, these two athletes who transition gender, is quite empathetic. And, you know, they definitely — they got the pronouns wrong. They use some words that we wouldn’t use today to describe these athletes. And there was certainly like a fair bit of sensationalism of these athletes and of this idea of transition. But, you know, through it all, I think there’s this real curiosity from the public and from journalists about, you know, like what it means to move between these categories.

SREENIVASAN: Tell us a little bit about another athlete that you write about, Helen Stephens.

WATERS: Helen Stephens, she’s kind of forgotten compared to Jesse Owens, but she was probably like the second most famous American athlete at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. So, she is this track runner from Missouri. And she, you know, is this woman — you know, they didn’t have that term then, but like, we can identify as a cis woman today. And she sort of — because of a childhood accident had this, like, very deep voice. You also had just like big biceps, she was often sort of noticed for her perceived masculinity. And, she — basically, in 1936, at the Berlin Olympics, she’s one of the top U.S. athletes. She eventually wins the gold medal at the same day as Jesse Owens wins his gold. And there’s all this scrutiny, you know, sort of in part because of these — of Koubek and Weston, these two athletes who transition gender. There’s all this sort of extra scrutiny and this heightened scrutiny on women’s sports and on athletes who are just like perceived to be masculine in some way. And Helen Stephens has always been — has always sort of dealt with this, but it really comes to a head at the Berlin Olympics. And there’s this new story, it’s — after she wins gold, there’s this new story published about her in this Polish newspaper that essentially accuses her of being like a man in disguise. And it’s not totally clear what happened, but at the very least you saw for the first time in the press this idea of like examining people to determine whether or not they should be in women’s sports and really coming out of this moment of fear mongering about this really prominent American athlete.

SREENIVASAN: There’s an interesting character you write about, kind of — it’s sort of behind this interest in figuring out how to test athletes. His name is will Wilhelm Knoll. Tell us a little bit about him. Who is he? Who was he?

WATERS: Yes, so, so Koubek transitioned — like announced that he was transitioning gender at the end of 1935. And like I said, you know, it becomes a global news story that is written about, you know, really with this sense of curiosity about the possibilities of transition. And so, while the public is just kind of curious about, like, OK, it’s literally, like, how is it possible to move between these categories? Like what are the medical advances that that sort of allow this, you do see this small group of sports officials who have a very different reaction. And the most prominent among them is Wilhelm Knoll, who in January 1936, writes this op-ed, essentially accusing Koubek of being a fraud and deceitful in some way. And Knoll seemed to take issue with the fact that Koubek had been in women’s sports at all. And Knoll, just for some background context, you know, he was a quite influential sports doctor in 1936. He was the head of this group of sports doctors who advised, you know, the IOC, the Track and Field Federation. This is a very early era of sports science. And so, he, just by nature of having that position, had a lot of cachet. He was also a registered Nazi at the time. And he was really an ardent believer. You know, he taught at a university and he wore the brown shirt uniform to classes. And he — you know, like, separately from Koubek, he had all of these writings about how he wanted to eliminate Jewish athletes, athletes of color from sports in general. So, he just kind of has a tendency because of his belief in eugenics to push out athletes. And he saw Koubek and this possibility of transition as some kind of threat. And you know, something that needs to be weeded out.

SREENIVASAN: Tell me, you know, for people who might not be paying attention to kind of the history of how these policies have evolved, what’s happened in the world of international competition when it comes to identifying gender or trying to figure out if there’s an advantage? Because it seems that we’ve shifted away from, you know, kind of a physical exam into slightly more scientific measures.

WATERS: The original policies were, like you said, they were just physical exams. They would have strip test women athletes. Again, it’s not really clear like what were they looking for or which kinds of bodies would be allowed, which wouldn’t? That was never outlined in these early years. You know, eventually that ran into a lot of problems. And so, as sex testing grew, sports officials began embracing a chromosome-based test, which essentially would try to sort of delineate athletes by, like, measuring their — they’re testing their chromosomes. The problem was, you know, there are a lot of like athletes who would probably identify as cis women today who have like a multiplicity of chromosomes. They were just sort of quietly expelled from the Olympics in the like ’60s and ’70s and into the ’80s. There’s a lot of backlash to this. So, the policy switched over to testing hormone levels. And today, what we have is kind of a grab bag of different policies. So, the IOC, the International Olympic Committee, which makes a lot of these overarching policies, they’ve actually said that they no longer want to set the terms of eligibility for women athletes, and they released a statement in 2021 that actually talked about wanting to have more inclusion of trans intersex women in sports, but they left it up to the individual federation. So, like, the Track and Field Federation, for example, to sort of govern their own group of sports separately. And what has happened is that, in a lot of cases, these policies have become quite restrictive and have banned, like, nearly — in many cases, banned nearly all trans women from competing in the Olympics, also have set really hard limits on women who might fit on an intersex spectrum, and even cis women who have high testosterone levels limitations on whether they can play and how they can play, but it really depends now based on sports. So, the current policy is really different depending on what sport you look at, but that same concept of we’re going to regulate, like, which kind of women can compete, I think you can sort of draw a direct line between 1936 and today, even as the policies themselves have gotten very different and the things that are being tested has gotten very different.

SREENIVASAN: In an op-ed that you wrote for “The New York Times,” you mentioned, this summer at the Paris Olympics, sex testing policies will be in some ways even more extreme than in years past. Why is that?

WATERS: Yes. Well, I think that’s in part because of the fact that these international federations, these sort of like sports organizations that I mentioned that govern something like track and field or swimming have actually gotten stricter on eligibility requirements. So, if you just look at a track and field, for instance, a few years ago at the Olympics, there was a path to inclusion for trans women athletes in track and field. It would involve, like, keeping your hormone levels, like, in a certain range. So, it was difficult, but there was a way for a trans woman could theoretically compete. Now, the Track and Field Federation has basically gotten rid of that entirely and all but banned trans women. And so, I think you see kind of a similar story in a lot of different sports, which is that these policies are getting stricter, even as the IOC, which is kind of like the top of this governing bureaucracy, sports structure, even as the IOC is saying, we want more inclusion, you know, not a lot of the sports federations have taken the hop on that.

SREENIVASAN: You know, this has been such a topic for American political culture wars. One of the core concerns for people is this notion of fairness. And in competitions like, say, track and field, it’s literally who gets across the line first and whether or not someone has an inherent advantage perhaps because of their biology. What’s the problem? Is there a problem in that thinking?

WATERS: There is so much fixation on trans and intersex women in sports, and we don’t have that same kind of dialogue about many other kinds of like perceived advantage that are just sort of baked into how we think about sports. So, if you think about something like basketball, you know, it certainly helps to be tall. We’re not trying to regulate the heights of basketball players. Even when you think about these efforts to regulate testosterone levels in women, you know, we don’t do the same thing in men’s sports. And if the idea is that, you know, testosterone levels confer some kind of unfair athletic advantage, you know, men have the same diversity of testosterone levels as women, so why wouldn’t we also limit like men’s testosterone levels? It doesn’t really make sense to go down that path. That’s not even to mention, you know, someone like Michael Phelps, who’s born with this really specific genetic condition that gives him like a long wingspan that also happens to be perfect for swimming. You know, or some of these more like invisible types of advantage like class, you know, early on in your sports career, you know, whether you can pay for trainers or to go to some kind of summer camp and work your way up in sports can really influence, you know, whether you can make it to this elite level. And all of this is just to say that, like, I think a great thing about the Olympics is it brings together a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds and experiences and people who sort of exist on the spectrum of bodies and experience that we all do and there’s some things that we can’t regulate and we accept that we can’t regulate. And I think, to me, it is quite telling to see the fixation on trans women in sports and intersex women in sports specifically, and also, cis women with high testosterone levels in a way that we don’t fixate on any of these other things throughout the history. It strikes me that we’ve been having the same conversation kind of over and over again, and often erased from all of this is the athletes themselves and just, you know, their humanity. And then, also, just like the immense skill it takes to get to the point where you could maybe go to the Olympics. You know, these are all athletes of, like, unbelievable skill who’ve put in years and years of their lives into this sport. And so, to me, it’s just kind of unthinkable that we would then say, actually, you don’t meet this sort of subjective, everchanging definition of woman, and so, therefore, you can’t compete. Yes, that’s — I guess that’s sort of what I’ve gleaned from looking at the history.

SREENIVASAN: The book is called “The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports.” Author Michael Waters, thanks so much for joining us.

WATERS: Thank you for having me.