You point out in Koubek’s case that he becomes a celebrity and is even welcomed. This is all relative, but there seems to be a lot of open-mindedness and positivity in a lot of the coverage following Koubek.
There’s a bit of sensationalism to the coverage. There is a little bit of fascination because he is one of the few prominent people who is sort of transitioning. Reporters get his pronouns wrong all the time. In some articles, you see every conceivable pronoun used to describe him.
But I think through it all, you see this real empathy and curiosity about transition and what’s possible medically in terms of logistics. People are interested in this idea of these categories of male and female, and what you’re assigned at birth is not as set in stone as they would have expected.
Right. I don’t want to give them too much credit, but the media’s coverage of Koubek wasn’t as painful or as terrible as I expected, especially when you consider how trans people are covered and written about today.
In that vein of looking at today, I think the stark thing in your book is that you see when and where the narrative surrounding Koubek and other athletes shifts. That’s the Olympics in Nazi Germany.
What was so interesting to me is that these [current] Olympic sex testing or eligibility policies have their historical roots in 1936. And those historical roots really, I think, are in this anxiety over women athletes. In the 1930s, there’s just a general fear of masculine women in sports and this idea of sports, especially a sport like track and field, as being both somehow dangerous to health, but also imperiling this really strict notion of femininity.
I think that Koubek, in some way, proves the fears of mostly male sports officials who were worried that the act of playing sports is changing something in women athletes and sort of masculinizing them in this way that they found intolerable.
Yes, absolutely. They used fear and suspicion as a cudgel and anyone — you note that Jewish athletes also face similar kinds of discrimination — who didn’t conform to their ideas of “norm” got punished.
Just the fact that in the 1930s, the conception was this idea of a medical exam, which was this kind of strip test. The strip test would be given out if a competitor had a question about another one of their competitors. You can just sort of force your competitor to be physically examined by a doctor.