The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports

Sex testing of athletes has its roots in the Nazi influence on the 1936 Olympic games, according to this revelatory debut investigation. Journalist Waters recaps the early years of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF), a subdivision of the International Olympic Committee established in 1913 to settle such “technical debates” as “how to... draw track lines.” When the Olympics sought to absorb the Women’s World Games in the 1920s, the IAAF got involved in its regulatory capacity; ostensibly concerned about women’s “health,” IAAF officials suggested shutting down the Women’s Games’ “masculine” sports like track and field. Other narrative strands trace the German Olympic Committee’s 1932 takeover by the Nazis and the early 1930s female-to-male medical transitions of several record-holding European athletes in women’s track and field. All this comes to a head with the 1936 Berlin games, when paranoia over men participating in women’s sports, promulgated by Nazi propagandists railing against the high-profile athletes’ gender transitions, prompted the IAAF to require female Olympians to “prove” their gender by being physically examined, a policy which continued until the 1990s and was succeeded by genetic and hormone testing. Waters’s propulsive storytelling is bursting with insight, especially into the lives of trans men during the interwar period. It’s an eye-opening look at how fascist philosophy undergirds gender regulatory regimes in sports. (June)