His first surgical operation was completed around February, 1936. The technology for female-to-male surgeries was limited; the first phalloplasty wasn’t performed until that fall, in Russia. Koubek never described his procedure except to say that it “did not hurt me at all.” After the second operation, a nurse led him to the men’s ward, where he found a hospital bed labelled with his new, masculinized first and last names. Sun poured in through a bedside window. He watched blackbirds flitting around in a garden outside. Later, he told the press that he planned to re-start his athletic training—this time, to compete against men.
Koubek was not the first person to publicly transition gender, but he was one of the most high-profile. That fall, the long-serving editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Morris Fishbein, wrote a widely distributed op-ed positioning Koubek as part of a long history. “No doubt in various places in the United States today there are little girls growing up who will eventually turn out to be predominantly male and who will need the type of diagnosis and surgery that has been mentioned,” he wrote. “What they need most at this time is proper understanding by their parents, by their doctors and by the community in general.” The popular science magazine Sexology reported on Koubek, and letters poured in from people who might today call themselves trans or intersex. One letter writer, who was perceived by the world as a man, asked, “Could I live the balance of my life as a woman, as I have desired to be all my life? It seems to me that it would repay me for the years of suffering I have already put in.”
Wilhelm Knoll had a different response. He was the head of the International Federation of Sports Medicine, an influential group of sports doctors which advised the I.O.C. and the International Amateur Athletic Federation (I.A.A.F.), the organization that governed the international rules of track and field. He was also a member of the Nazi Party who gave lectures at the University of Hamburg dressed in a Brown Shirt uniform, with a swastika pinned to his shirt. His allegiance to Nazism and his views about competition went hand in hand: Knoll wrote of his desire to remove “unsuitable elements” from sports, a term that seemed to refer not only to Jewish people but also to racial and gender minorities. Knoll read the early news accounts of Koubek’s impending transition, and he was disgusted that the press largely championed the Czech athlete.