Waters, Michael
9781250390479, 1250390478
Trade Paperback
 
Now in paperback, a “deftly written and engrossing book“ (The Washington Post) of the early trans athletes and Olympic bureaucrats who lit the flame for today’s culture wars.
 
In December 1935, Zdenek Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports, declared he was now living as a man. Around the same time, the celebrated British field athlete Mark Weston, also assigned female at birth, announced that he, too, was a man. Periodicals and radio programs across the world carried the news; both athletes became global celebrities. Their transitions could have sparked a push toward equality. Instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, their announcements had the exact opposite effect: widespread panic around trans, intersex, and gender-nonconforming athletes.

In The Other Olympians, Michael Waters uncovers, for the first time, the gripping true stories of Koubek, Weston, and several other pioneering trans and intersex athletes of their era. With dogged research and dramatic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany’s atrocities in order to pull off the 1936 Berlin Games, ultimately leading to the IOC’s nearly century-long obsession with surveilling and cataloging gender.

Immersive and revelatory, The Other Olympians is a groundbreaking, hidden-in-the-archives marvel, an inspiring call for equality, and an essential contribution toward understanding the contemporary culture wars over gender in sports.