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Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports
by Michael Waters
The story of the early trans athletes and Olympic bureaucrats who lit the flame for today's culture wars.
In December 1935, Zdeněk 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 became global celebrities. A few decades later, they were all but forgotten. And in the wake of their transitions, what could have been a push toward equality became instead, through a confluence of bureaucracy, war, and sheer happenstance, the exact opposite: the now all-too-familiar 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 other pioneering trans and intersex athletes from their era. With dogged research and cinematic flair, Waters also tracks how International Olympic Committee members ignored Nazi Germany's atrocities in order to pull off the Berlin Games, a partnership that ultimately influenced 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.
"[A] revelatory debut investigation ... 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." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A significant deep dive into the queer historical evolution and significance of transgender athletes in organized sports ... Densely factual, impeccably researched, and written with dramatic flair, this book intensively probes gender bias in the Olympics amid the rise of European midcentury fascism and the epic challenges to gender essentialism." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Sports buffs and historians will enjoy his deeply researched book." ―Booklist
"A riveting and important work of history. Michael Waters performs an Olympian act of storytelling, using the stories of these extraordinary athletes to explore in brilliant detail the struggle for understanding and equality. The Other Olympians is a book of great originality, deeply researched and beautifully written." ―Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life
"Michael Waters masterfully puts into focus the long-overlooked, yet remarkable stories of a cadre of Olympians who battled for their right to compete on the world's biggest stage as their true selves. A crucial read for anyone interested in the intersection of sports, identity, and social justice." ―Neal Bascomb, author of The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It
"A remarkable and compelling chronicle of a forgotten episode in both the history of sport and the history of gender that demonstrates their centrality in the Nazis' rise to power." ―Drew Gilpin Faust, author of Necessary Trouble
This information about The Other Olympians was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michael Waters has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Wired, Slate, Vox, and elsewhere. He was the 2021-22 New York Public Library Martin Duberman Visiting Scholar in LGBTQ studies and lives in Brooklyn.
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