Yahoo Sports Sex Testing at the Olympics: The History of Discrimination Against Trans Athletes and Women
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Skipped History is a newsletter focused on overlooked and underexamined events, movements, and people that have shaped American history. In this installment, host Ben Tumin speaks to Michael Waters, author of The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, about the exclusion of trans athletes at the Olympics. In conversation, they explore how the roots of “eligibility requirements” today can be traced back to the 1930s.
As Tumin says, “it’s no coincidence that sex testing began at the 1936 Olympic Games held in Nazi Germany.”
A condensed transcript edited for clarity is republished below with permission.
Ben: To begin, can you talk a little bit about the formation of the modern Olympics?
MW:. The modern Olympics started in 1896, founded by Pierre de Coubertin, a French aristocrat. He had conflicting motives. On one hand, his idea for a global sports competition stemmed from anxieties about French masculinity following a war defeat. He saw sports as a way to masculinize French men. On the other hand, he envisioned the Olympics as a diplomatic tool to bring different countries together, hoping sports would reduce tension.
So Coubertin was instrumental in getting the Olympics off the ground. However, he wasn’t great with finer organizational details. The early Olympics, like those in 1896, 1900, and 1904, were quite chaotic compared to the well-oiled machine we see today. Things frequently went wrong.
Ben: I was tickled by your descriptions of chaos at early Olympics: sprinters arriving late and taking snack breaks during races; athletes drinking champagne and brandy to sharpen their focus.
I was less delighted by your discussion of early gender and class dynamics at the Olympics.
MW: Yes, the early Olympics were almost entirely male-dominated. A few sports were open to women, but these were typically associated with the upper class, like golf and tennis, which required money to participate. Sports that were more accessible, like track and field, were deemed too masculinizing or dangerous for women. The International Olympic Committee, run by wealthy white men, didn’t include a woman until 1981.
Pierre de Coubertin himself was deeply opposed to women participating in the Olympics, writing often about his dislike for women athletes. Women's participation in elite sports was largely due to Alice Milliat, a French woman who created the Women's World Games in the 1920s. These games were quite popular and even threatened to overtake the Olympics at one point.
Ben: Your book focuses on athletes like Zdeněk Koubek and Mark Weston. Can you give us a bit of background on them?
MW: Both athletes transitioned gender in the 1930s. Zdeněk Koubek, a Czech sprinter, came from a working-class family and became obsessed with running in the late 1920s. His career peaked in 1934 at the Women's World Games, where he set a new world record in the 800 meters. He transitioned in 1935 and became a global tabloid fixture.
Mark Weston, a British shot putter, participated in the Women's World Games in 1926 and 1930. He retired in the early 1930s, pursued a career as a massage therapist, and transitioned in 1936. Their transitions received widespread media coverage and, maybe surprisingly, were embraced by the public and the press, at least when compared to fear mongering in papers like The New York Times today.
However, some sports officials saw gender transition as a threat to sports. Wilhelm Knoll, a Nazi sports doctor, wrote an op-ed calling Koubek a fraud and advocated for medical exams to prevent similar transitions, introducing the idea of sex testing in sports.
As you alluded earlier, the field of sports science was not so advanced—
Ben: —other than recommendations to drink champagne before, during, and after races—
MW: —right, except for that. And Knoll's extreme reaction to gender transitions highlights the early fears and misunderstandings about gender in sports. His campaign also sounded a lot like his statements urging Nazi leaders to purge "unsuitable elements," including Jewish and non-white people, from sports.
Ben: And then there's Avery Brundage, an American figure who also supported the Nazis. Can you talk about how a new system of gender surveillance came together under his supervision during the 1936 Olympics?
MW: Avery Brundage was the head of the American Olympic Committee in the 1930s. He was a major advocate for the U.S. attending the Berlin Olympics despite significant boycott movements, especially from Jewish American advocates. Brundage was sympathetic to Nazi ideology and repeated their talking points about Jewish people.
Ben: Brundage once defended the Nazis by saying, “In my club in Chicago, Jews are not permitted, either.”
MW: That about sums it up.
By the 1930s, it was known that biological sex exists on a spectrum, influenced by various traits. There was no way to clearly divide people into binaries. Brundage and Knoll weren't trying to reconcile with this complexity. They just had personal ideas about who should be allowed to compete.
Brundage became a member of the International Olympic Committee at the Berlin Olympics. Though the IOC decided not to move forward with sex testing, Brundage was also a member of the IAAF, a federation that governed track and field. The IAAF passed its own sex testing policy, allowing any woman to protest another competitor if they suspected a "problem of a physical nature." This policy targeted masculine or intersex women, leading to invasive medical examinations.
By the 1960s, the IAAF’s rule had become the policy of the Olympics as a whole.
Ben: Which was right around when the origins of the sex testing policy disappeared from popular memory.
MW: Exactly. In the 1960s, sex testing gained new momentum due to Cold War tensions. Conspiracy theories spread in the U.S. about a group of really successful women athletes from the USSR at the Olympics. On the American side, there was this idea that they couldn’t possibly be women, and all these stories were published about how at least one of them was allegedly assigned male at birth but forced to take feminizing hormones and play in the Olympics.
Newspapers also falsely claimed cis men had competed as women in the 1930s under the Nazi banner. But all these stories were totally false, spun out of nowhere.
Ben: I don’t know what’s more troubling: how inventive the stories were or how much they spread.
Where do things stand today? How do you see the legacy of the 1930s playing out in the 2020s?
MW: Today, sex testing policies are different and not even called sex testing anymore. The modern version involves “eligibility requirements” set by individual sports federations, not the IOC. Many federations exclude all trans women and many intersex women and cis women with high testosterone levels. Some use chromosome tests, which were discredited in the 20th century but are now returning.
Looking at the history, it’s clear we’ve never had an open conversation about the spectrum of the body and gender in sports. Sports officials prefer to push out anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into male or female categories. Rather than reconciling with the fact that male and female categories are imperfect, they've decided to push out anyone who is evidence of that reality.
We need to acknowledge the humanity and skill of these athletes to even be able to make it to the Olympics, and recognize that male and female categories are imperfect. Prioritizing inclusion should stop being the exception and start being the goal.
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