Numlock Sunday: Michael Waters on the queer history of the Olympics
Numlock Sunday: Michael Waters on the queer history of the Olympics
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Michael Waters, author of the upcoming book The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports.
We spoke about the 1936 Olympics and the trans athletes who made headlines that year, the inner workings of sports bureaucracy, and the invention and evolution of sex-testing policies in athletics.
Waters can be found at his website and on Twitter, and the book comes out this Tuesday, you can get it wherever books are sold.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Michael Waters, thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you for having me.
You are the author of the book The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports. I was really taken aback when I was reading your book because it goes back to a very fascinating part of history and covers topics that have a ton of relevance today, but also have a deeper and more remarkable history of gender in athletics than I think people tend to give it credit for. What turned you on to these people and just the stories that you dive into?
I'm really coming at this from a queer history background. In my work, I'm always really interested in locating these figures in communities, these queer figures in queer communities, that existed in these spaces and times where we don't really expect them. What's fascinating to me about studying something like queer history is that we, in our modern day, tend to think of queer community and activism or whatever it is as a relatively recent thing, maybe hinged around Stonewall as a big turning point. But when you actually look at the past, there are all these stories of queer people finding each other and being able to move between gender categories. Like before World War II, or going back as far back as you want to go. So for me, first and foremost, I'm always interested in uncovering that and trying to elevate that in some way, because I think it just adds to the texture of how we think about gender and sexuality today.
I kind of stumbled on the story of Zdeněk Koubek and Mark Weston by accident, who are these two athletes who transitioned gender in the 1930s. Those are the two athletes who are at the center of my book. I'm always looking through newspapers.com, which is this digital newspaper archive, with various key words, seeing what it pulls up. It eventually pulled up these articles from 1936 in which a bunch of newspapers were talking about this phenomenon of these two athletes who had transitioned, and trying to explain to a 1936 audience what it means to move between these categories of male and female that were rigidly enforced at the time. What fascinated me is that there was this real sense of curiosity about these athletes transitioning and how it was possible. In some people's cases, there were people expressing a desire to do the same.
These athletes who had transitioned gender were treated like celebrities, and their transitions catapulted them to a level of fame that they hadn't even had before. Reading that in 2021, when you started to see these early signs of states moving against trans and intersex athletes, when you see national sports bodies creating policies banning a lot of these athletes, you see a stark contrast that in 1936 there was this sense of curiosity and possibility about gender, breaking down gender categories in sports. And then in our contemporary moment, we’re really going in the opposite direction. That dissonance was really what got me down this rabbit hole of trying to make sense of how this was possible in 1936 and what happened. What got us to this place in the 90 years in between?
Yeah. That's one reason I really love this, because, like you mentioned, it was greeted with curiosity rather than condemnation. I think the open-mindedness of people of this era was a really fascinating element of your book that I definitely took away as something rather surprising. But again, it does speak to just how recent our vision is on some of these topics.
Absolutely. And there are a couple caveats to that, which is that these athletes had, in Mark Weston's case, fully retired, and in Zdeněk Koubek’s case, temporarily retired. They were living as men after a career in women's sports. It’s not one-to-one in terms of the discussion that's happening today, but I do think there was that real sense of possibility, which is what attracted me to this story.
It’s interesting, too, because I think there is something a little bit queer about sports in a lot of different ways. In sports, you're constantly working on your body. It's a very gendered experience to be an athlete. And similarly, you can see in different cultural products people playing on even the homoeroticism of sports. Even just being able to say that in fact sports have always been queer in these ways was a big part of the appeal for me in writing it.
Like the Olympics in general, which you write about here, and the history of that. Or, obviously, writing about people who are coming up in Eastern Europe in the 1930s is very compelling. Do you want to talk a little bit about Mark and Zdeněk and take us from the beginning with them?
Really the center point of the book is Zdeněk Koubek, who is this Czech track runner who in 1934 set a new world record in the women's 800 meters. He is a fascinating figure for a lot of reasons. When he was participating in women's sports, he was one of the most famous track runners in Europe to some extent, and especially in Czechoslovakia. But he didn't really have international renown prior to transitioning.
I don't know how much we want to go into this, but he was participating in this rival to the Olympics called the Women's World Games, because there were very few women’s track and field sports offered at the Olympics at the time. If you were participating in women's sports, which he was before he transitioned, you would be participating in the Women's World Games, which was actually this quite popular alternative to the Olympics that was trying to do something different and be a different form of sports governance than the Olympics.
In that world, Koubek became quite successful. He basically reaches the capstone of his career in 1934 and then starts seeing a doctor in the latter half of 1935 because he'd always had these desires to live as a man and wanted to see whether it was possible. Then, in December 1935, there's this newspaper report that's publicly published that announces that going forward he's going to be living as a man. It was a local Czech newspaper, and then it just got picked up by Reuters and became this international phenomenon.
He became pretty world-famous for a year, that following year in 1936. At this time he isn’t currently playing sports, but he is invited to New York and he goes and performs on Broadway. There are tons and tons of American reporters that interviewed him. A lot of tabloids would pay pretty large sums of money to get to speak to him just because there's this element of sensationalism covering him, but also, like we just said, there’s this sense of befuddlement and curiosity about him. After he comes to New York and performs on Broadway, he goes to Paris, dances with Josephine Baker. He becomes this really global star for a moment.
A lot of my book is based on him because he also in 1936 wrote this short memoir about his life that was published in a Czech magazine, which is a really incredible source as a writer, because it's him going through all of the beats of his life for 40,000 words.
Wow. What a remarkable document.
I know! Which is the only reason this book is possible, truly. It makes you realize how much of any historical book is so much about luck. I just don’t think I could have written this if it weren't for that. So, kind of by the nature of the sourcing, he became the most prominent figure in my book.
And secondarily, Koubek transitions first in December 1935, but then in May 1936 there’s this British athlete named Mark Weston, who was a shot putter who had retired from sports. He wasn't as successful as Koubek; he went to the Women's World Games, but never medaled. He's from Plymouth, England, and was known in his region to sports aficionados but not really more widely. He, too, begins living as a man after undergoing this series of operations. That story also takes on legs way outside of England when international press covers it again.
Then what happens is that in this really short time frame, these two relatively statured athletes have transitioned gender. I think the fact that it was two people in a short time frame really fuels more stories trying to make sense of how it was possible to transition. What do these categories of male and female even mean? That is where you see some of this limitlessness, this sense that we are on the brink of understanding gender and the possibilities of gender in a new way, which is really interesting to me.
And then, of course, on the side of the sports officials, they saw this not as something to be intrigued about and want to understand better, but rather as something to repress. This idea of people transitioning to this really small group of sports officials felt like a threat to the ways in which they devised the Olympics itself.
I want to dive in on that, because one thing I loved about the book and one theme throughout it is that it's also a story about sports bureaucracies. I never put a ton of thought to it until reading this, but there’s a lot of power allocated to a bunch of people who used to play a sport who then run the overseeing body of it. Obviously one reason that we love stories about sports is that sports really do imitate life. I was just really taken aback.
Do you want to talk a little bit about the bureaucracy element of this? They keep on coming up as pervasive characters and adversaries, and it's just such an interesting subtext of the book. I would love to hear you talk a little about that.
The bureaucracies that I’m writing about are mostly the International Olympic Committee, the IOC, and the International Amateur Athletic Federation, the IAAF, which oversees track and field. I use this metaphor that the IOC is like the federal government and then the IAAF is, as a sports federation, like a state government. That’s pretty rough, but gets you there.
One interesting thing is that these two bodies were for the most part not actually made up of former athletes, but at the time, in the 1930s, made up largely of very rich, often aristocratic men, and it was all men in this case. It wasn’t even just people who cared about sports, but it was also this particular group of people. The IOC at the time was this moneyed social club where only certain people could even afford the trip to travel abroad every year for these meetings. It wasn't a paid position, and new members of the IOC were selected on recommendation, so it was basically just friends who were of the same, elite class.
I mention that because I think that's important also for understanding where these rules come from. 1936 is when we get this first iteration of sex-testing policies that today are still excluding a lot of trans and intersex women from sports. Understanding the people behind it, the fact that it was all men, it was a lot of wealthy men, it was people with dynastic status or running big companies who certainly weren't educated in the nuances of the body and the spectrum of biological sex that we exist on — I think that really helps us see just why these policies have felt so confused and broken for so long. They weren't really thought through, and they were created by this bureaucracy that wasn't really invested in trying to be fair or equitable but rather saw something in the form of a gender transition as a problem. They didn't try to articulate policy that would include people; they were like, “We have to do something about this,” and then just thought they knew best.
I think it’s important to denaturalize how these bureaucracies work and understand the motivations of the people behind them, because they, like you said, shape sports. They shape who can even be in sports and have for decades, and the impact that sex-testing policy had is so disproportionate to the amount of time that any of these men spent thinking about it.
Totally. It's a bunch of wealthy dilettantes in the 1930s and we're still living in the world that they have made.
Right, exactly. And once you pass a policy and you establish it as part of how the Olympics work, when you pass this sex-testing rule and it becomes part of the DNA of track and field sports, it's way harder to roll that back. It just puts anyone who would want to have a real conversation about how to include a variety of different people in sports on the back foot. They have to then try to work back a policy that's been enshrined in the handbook versus having that open conversation from the start.
Yeah. That's fascinating.
You highlight a few major events, and to that effect, the decision that the International Olympic Committee made in 1936 still has a lot of ramifications today. Do you want to walk us through how one Olympic Games and one competitive event had such reverberations?
For sure. And this maybe gets at the complexity of sports bureaucracy, but actually, in 1936 the IOC itself considered a sex-testing policy and decided not to implement it. They instead kicked it down to the individual sports federations, the track and field federation, which is interesting because it also just shows the weirdness of all of this and how many hands are involved. It’s like a hot potato that no one really wants to deal with. So the IOC hot potatoed it down to the IAAF, which ended up passing the first sex-testing policy in August 1936. Later, the IOC itself would pass this umbrella policy. But they’re even doing the same thing today, because now the IOC has no policy. It kicks it down to individual athletic federations to decide about the inclusion of trans and intersex people.
But there are a couple reasons why the 1936 Olympics were so pivotal. One was that the fact of Koubek and Weston's gender transition really just brought this topic into the spotlight, and while the public was not calling for any kind of sex-testing policy, which I think is important to note, a few sports officials read these stories and had this pretty knee-jerk reaction to them. So their transition was a big part of that.
Then, also, 1936 is a year in which Nazi-affiliated sports officials of different kinds, including sports doctors, just had a lot of power and a lot of influence over the international sports landscape. Actually, one of the main people that you see pushing for these sex-testing policies in 1936 is this really prominent sports physician named Wilhelm Noll, who is a registered Nazi. You really see a lot of the fascist ideology cropping up in the ways that he's advocating for sex-testing policies.
So, this was an ideological time in which a lot of the people making these policies were inclined to see gender variance as a problem and not really think any further about it, which made it much easier to craft a policy around keeping out certain athletes. And then I could talk about Helen Stephens.
By all means.
The other thing that happens at the 1936 Olympics is this woman named Helen Stephens, who was this really prominent American sprinter who actually wins gold in Berlin in the 100-meter dash. She is a source of all of these rumors about her gender.
It’s hard to make sense of what the speculation was saying. By all accounts, she would fall into the category of cis woman today. But she has large biceps; she has this really deep voice because of a childhood accident. There's a ton of speculation about whether she in some way does not fit the category of “woman,” and there's a newspaper report in Poland that accuses her of actually being a man. It’s kind of unclear if that is trying to say she's maybe intersex in some way or if they really think she would be a cis man in disguise. Then there's this confusing series of reports that claims she was potentially medically examined by some sports officials to determine whether or not she was, quote-unquote, “truly a woman,” whatever that means. There are later denials, so it's not really clear that that happened.
But at the very least, there was this extra scrutiny of her body and her gender in the Summer Olympics right before these sex-testing policies are passed. These months of tension around what gender means really spill over in the Berlin Olympics, and suddenly it becomes normal to question an athlete, especially an athlete who's participating in women's sports, and question their gender, their sex, their body, whether or not they should be allowed to be here. It’s right after all of this conversation about Helen Stephens winning gold that the IAAF passes their policies.
One interesting part of the book is that it really reminds you that overt, unambiguous categorization is a decision that was made, right? It's not something innate about competition or athletics or gender or any of that stuff. The bureaucracies that you write about over the course of the book are choosing to make active decisions that are codifying these things as categories. This isn't necessarily something that came sui generis out of the existing world. It was just a bunch of strange wealthy people who were making fascinating choices because they had the power to.
For sure. That's such a great way of putting it. And you see the subjectivity of these decisions when you track the policies around sex testing itself over the decades. You really see this in terms of what criteria different sports bodies use to define who gets to be a man and who gets to be a woman.
The earliest versions of sex testing were literal strip tests where somehow they thought they could just strip someone down and know which category to assign them. Then they figured out that, obviously, biological sex is a spectrum. There's no one single trait that really defines someone as being definitively male or definitively female. We’re assigning these sexes somewhat subjectively. So sports officials realize, okay, we can't just strip people. It's inhumane, and it's also imperfect.
They move on to chromosome testing in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, and chromosome testing is also imperfect because there are plenty of people who might have a mosaic of chromosomes that don't really impact anything about them. They might not even know that they have this chromosome mosaic in the first place. So banning women who had a chromosome mosaic didn't really make sense either, because that didn't mean they weren't women. And then they've moved on more recently to this hormone-based system of measuring testosterone levels.
I bring that up because you see that at each juncture, sports officials are making a choice about how they want to define the category of woman. And really what they're butting up against is that there's no clean way to do that. There is no singular trait that can nicely cleave people into these binary categories. When we are defining who can be in men's sports and who can be in women's sports, we are making choices. And these officials are making subjective choices, sometimes without really considering the ramifications of their choices, all throughout the 20th century and into today.
Wow. Again, the book's phenomenal. It's a really amazing historical document, and you were working some really fascinating sources here. It was so cool to hear about the behind-the-scenes on that. This is a really remarkable book, and I really enjoyed it.
As we wrap up, what would you say is your biggest takeaway from the book? And why don't you tell people where they can find it?
In addition to some of that stuff about the subjectivity of a lot of these sex-testing policies that we have today, for me, the big takeaway of the book is just how rich history is. If you track something like gender over time, you just see way more diversity and variation when you really start digging than appears on the surface.
That and the fact that there was even this really big discussion about what it means to transition in the 1930s. Honestly, five years ago, before I started this research, I wouldn't have expected that. So I hope other people are looking into that and can find other really cool stories from the archives, because I know they must exist.
The book comes out June 4, and it’s available anywhere books are sold.
All right. Thanks so much.
Edited by Susie Stark.
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