Discrimination against trans Olympians has roots in Nazi Germany

Despite being a time when people from all over the world come together in equality and peace, the Olympics are still uncertain territory for transgender athletes. There are no transgender women athletes participating at this year’s Games. Transgender women who transitioned after puberty aren’t allowed to compete in major sports on a college level. 

Athletes Nikki Hultz, a runner, and Hergie Bacyadan, a boxer, both identify as transgender (Hultz also identifies as nonbinary), but both have always and continue to compete in the women’s division, which is the sex they were assigned at birth. 

Outside of the Games, trans people face so much backlash, often for simply existing. The conversation around sports is particularly fraught, from children’s athletics right up through the pros. Despite the International Olympic Committee vowing to be more inclusive, the future for trans athletes is unclear. 

It all raises the question: How did we get to this point, and did it always have to be this way? 

The answers found in historian and journalist Michael Waters’s The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports might be surprising. Waters’s book traces the emergence of Zdeněk Koubek, a track and field star representing the country formerly known as Czechoslovakia who, at 21, won two medals — a gold in the 800m and a bronze in the long jump — at the 1934 Women’s World Games. (The Women’s World Games was the precursor to women competing at the Olympics). In 1935, Koubek announced that he would be living life as a man and swiftly became an international celebrity.  

Perhaps the most intriguing facet to Koubek’s story was in the public response. Koubek was more welcomed and celebrated than we might imagine. There was an open-mindedness and empathy to the reception of Koubek and his gender identity and expression in the 1930s. 

Waters also pinpoints where and when that changed, specifically at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. Armed with a propensity for eugenics, gender anxiety, and a startling lack of scientific evidence, a small set of Nazi officials influenced the International Olympic Committee into gender surveillance and trans panic — stuff that eerily mirrors the transphobic attacks that athletes, cis and trans alike, face today.  

In reading Waters’s account of Koubek and other trans and intersex athletes’ lives, it all feels like those Olympics were a breaking point. The Nazi era has substantially shaped the conversation surrounding trans athletes today. 

This conversation was edited and condensed for length and clarity. As Waters notes in The Other Olympians, we use different and more specific language to signify transgender and intersex identity today, making it difficult to fully translate stories from the past into contemporary language. We refer to Koubek with male pronouns because that’s how he expressed his gender identity publicly after his transition. 

I want to ask you, how did you find out about Koubek? I’ve never heard of him. I was so surprised —  in a good way! All the details about his life — how he loved running, how he got famous — how did you find his story? 

That’s sort of the reaction I had when I first came across him. History, especially before World War II, is full of the stories of queer people in the community kind of existing and becoming prominent way before you might expect.

What I found is that the way we would describe queer people, whether in terms of sexuality or gender transition — those phrases have changed so much over time, but when you know what [terms or phrases] might have been used in a specific era, you can actually find some really interesting stories. 

In the 1930s, a lot of transitions would be described as “sexual metamorphoses,” which is this weird technical word. Because this is a time before we have a concept of gender, it sort of comes from this idea that something had spontaneously changed in these people’s bodies, and then they’re a man or woman. 

Obviously, language has changed now and I think there’s a general effort to be more conscious of the terms we’re using. Back then, people didn’t have the words or language when it comes to gender identity and expression. 

I had a preconceived notion of queer history as generally bleak to awful. Like something out of Mad Max. And from reading your book, I was surprised to find that it wasn’t exactly that. 

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really easy to think of like, before World War II and especially even before Stonewall generally as this dark period where there can’t be public embraces of queerness. 

It’s so much more complicated than that. 

You point out in Koubek’s case that he becomes a celebrity and is even welcomed. This is all relative, but there seems to be a lot of open-mindedness and positivity in a lot of the coverage following Koubek.

There’s a bit of sensationalism to the coverage. There is a little bit of fascination because he is one of the few prominent people who is sort of transitioning. Reporters get his pronouns wrong all the time. In some articles, you see every conceivable pronoun used to describe him. 

But I think through it all, you see this real empathy and curiosity about transition and what’s possible medically in terms of logistics. People are interested in this idea of these categories of male and female, and what you’re assigned at birth is not as set in stone as they would have expected.

Right. I don’t want to give them too much credit, but the media’s coverage of Koubek wasn’t as painful or as terrible as I expected, especially when you consider how trans people are covered and written about today. 

In that vein of looking at today, I think the stark thing in your book is that you see when and where the narrative surrounding Koubek and other athletes shifts. That’s the Olympics in Nazi Germany. 

What was so interesting to me is that these [current] Olympic sex testing or eligibility policies have their historical roots in 1936. And those historical roots really, I think, are in this anxiety over women athletes. In the 1930s, there’s just a general fear of masculine women in sports and this idea of sports, especially a sport like track and field, as being both somehow dangerous to health, but also imperiling this really strict notion of femininity. 

I think that Koubek, in some way, proves the fears of mostly male sports officials who were worried that the act of playing sports is changing something in women athletes and sort of masculinizing them in this way that they found intolerable. 

Yes, absolutely. They used fear and suspicion as a cudgel and anyone — you note that Jewish athletes also face similar kinds of discrimination — who didn’t conform to their ideas of “norm” got punished. 

Just the fact that in the 1930s, the conception was this idea of a medical exam, which was this kind of strip test. The strip test would be given out if a competitor had a question about another one of their competitors. You can just sort of force your competitor to be physically examined by a doctor. 

I think you can see some of that nastiness permeate into sports today. It’s not unlike some of the conversations surrounding Serena Williams and Simone Biles throughout their careers. They’re often accused of being too masculine or muscular, and there have been insinuations that they dope or derisions that their bodies aren’t feminine enough. It’s a nefarious accusation. 

Well, this all starts with the origin of the Olympics. Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the Olympics, didn’t want women to play in sports, full stop. There are many quotes about how he didn’t like the sight of women athletes. Women athletes were looked at with suspicion. 

The current Paris Olympics website has an entire — not entirely convincing — page on de Coubertin’s views and how his sexist ideologies may have been a product of their time. 

This really helped cement this idea that there was something or there could be something unfeminine about successful athletes. That’s also tied to race and class. The first Olympic sports for women are sports like tennis and golf which, at the time, were really associated with the white upper class. 

I think tennis, especially, is still considered a more feminine sport today. 

Yeah. So there’s that important starting point, you have this fear-mongering about female athletes. Maybe a few women are okay if they play a certain kind of sport and they fit this notion of femininity, but there is real anxiety about what sports would do to the idea of gender in some way.

I think what you’re getting at is that women athletes, to make people more comfortable, had to perform and present themselves in a non-threatening, traditionally feminine way. I think that still happens in sports today when you look at who gets rewarded with sponsorships and deals and who gets to be the face of women’s sports. 

In reading your book, I found myself wondering a little bit about what would’ve happened to the conversation and policies surrounding trans athletes if things took a different turn in the 1930s. 

It’s easy to just assume that this is how sports had to be. It’s just really this specific coalition of officials who didn’t have the best morality in other aspects of their lives and political beliefs — 

A coalition of officials who were really into … Nazi Olympics! 

This is a little bit counterfactual, but I do think, at the very least, it’s also important to see that these sorts of restrictive policies weren’t inevitable and to see how they were constructed and who constructed them.

To the IOC’s credit, they released this policy statement in 2021 where they at least gestured at the idea of greater inclusion for trans and intersex athletes as well as women athletes with high hormone levels — groups that are often banned from competition.

I do believe that we are capable of having that conversation. And I do think the IOC statement suggests that there is some interest in talking about making sports more inclusive. But obviously, I think the policies on the ground at the Paris Olympics this year don’t really reflect that.