Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar, in for Alison Stewart. We're continuing our coverage of the Olympics, this time a history lesson centered around the questions, who is woman enough to play in women's sports, and who gets to decide? Journalist Michael Waters traces these questions back to the 1930s in his book, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports.

He introduces us to several athletes, like a record-breaking runner from Czechoslovakia and a shot putter from England. These athletes knew they were different. Some had been bullied for presenting as more masculine than other women. Others knew they were men but didn't yet have the medical transition complete. Their presence in sports ushered a wave of sex-testing and gender regulation in athletics. Sports doctors launched medical exams to make sure these athletes were fit to play in women's sports. And the people who signed off and even endorsed these regulations were members of organizations like the International Olympic Committee, the group that organizes the Olympics.

Waters also points out that some of these architects also subscribe to rising political ideologies in 1930s Europe like, well, fascism. The book is a sobering look at how politics and sports are often inextricable, a lesson that reverberates to this day. The full title of the book, again, is The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports. And joining me now is Michael Waters. Michael, hi, welcome to All Of It and to our Olympics hour.

Michael Waters: Yes, thank you for having me.

Kousha Navidar: So let's get into some of the athletes you introduce us to in your book. One of them is the runner Zednik Koebek. He was assigned female at birth and grew up in Czechoslovakia in the 1910s. When did you first stumble across his story?

Michael Waters: I stumbled across Koebek's story kind of by accident. My background is in writing queer history, and I spend a lot of time, more than anyone should, going through old newspaper archives. There's this great digital newspaper archive called newspapers.com, and literally just searching different terms related to how people would discuss, like sexuality or gender minorities in different eras.

I just kind of stumbled across this news story in the 1930s about Koebek and about this story of a Czech athlete, like you said, assigned female at birth who had played in women's sports and then decided to transition gender and live as a man going forward and then eventually play in men's sports. He was kind of a celebrity in 1936, right after he announced that he was transitioning. He came to New York. He performed on Broadway actually. He went to Paris and he danced with Josephine Baker. I saw this in the newspaper archive, and I wondered why I had not heard of him. It turned out that just his story has been a little bit lost in the intervening decades.

Kousha Navidar: Let's go through his story a little bit. Early on in your book, you talk about Koebek having the opportunity to run in a women's athletics club as a child, and some called Koebek, "a girl with the devil in their body". That's a big statement. Why are people saying that?

Michael Waters: Yes. I think that was probably in reference to just kind of his immense skill. He did a lot of different kinds of sports in track and field early on, but it turned out that his best sport was the 800 meters. Growing up, when he was playing in sports, he was playing in women's sports, he had yet to transition. He had these questions about his own self-identity, but he had yet to really reconcile them yet.

He really, over the years, starting in the late 1920s and into the early 1930s, he rose the ranks of the Czech sports world. He won some local competitions. He went to national competitions in the early thirties, he won that. He became just a known sort of figure in the Czech sporting world. Then the capstone of his career is in 1934 when he plays in this event called the Women's World Games.

As a bit of quick context, the 1930s, this is an era when the Olympics had actually very few sports for women at all, especially in track and field. And so Koebek's main sport, the 800 meters, was actually not offered at the Olympics for women, and so he kind of had no ability to even play at the Olympics. This French woman had created the Women's World Games as this rival to the Olympics. So for Koebek, that was like the capstone of his career. That was the highest level that one could participate in the women's 800 meters.

In 1934, he wins a gold medal and actually sets a new world record in the process, and so he kind of transitions at that moment from being this maybe locally known runner to at least among the sporting world in Europe, this really significant figure.

Kousha Navidar: When he was participating in the Women's World Games, was he embraced by the sports community at that time?

Michael Waters: Yes. I think there are a couple things there. One is that the Czech sports apparatus really loved him. You had a bunch of actually Czech film stars who gave money to support the Czech team going to the Women's World Games because there just wasn't a lot of funding for women's sports, and there still isn't, so it was up to celebrities to pay for the travel to London, which is where the games were held in 1934.

It is just right after Koebek wins gold when you first start to see these early fear and anxiety around women who are perceived as being overly masculine playing in sports, so there's this kind of ridiculous news cycle that happened right after the Women's World Games in 1934, where the head coach of the South Africa team, this was British colonial South Africa at the time, made this accusation that some of the women participating in the World Games were actually men in disguise, seemingly.

It sort of came out of these really long-running anxieties around women's sports and around this idea that sports would be not only dangerous to women, but in some way masculinizing. These concerns about health and even just gender presentation were all tied up, and it's after Koebek wins gold that you first start to see some of those anxieties really reached the public sphere.

Those, I should say, were not directed at Koebek exactly, but it was just like in 1934, it became clear that really all of the women participating, all of the athletes participating in women's track and field were under suspicion and were being scrutinized for really how they presented themselves and whether they met this strict definition of femininity.

Kousha Navidar: In your book, you underscore the role that the media plays, I think specifically newspaper that contributed to both the fear and the awareness of athletes like Koebek. For instance, there's this newspaper headline that you mentioned, which is "claims men posted as girls in sports events at London". Can you talk a little bit about the role that the media played in shaping this panic around, like what they called "sex fraud" in sports.

Michael Waters: Yes. I think there's a couple of parallel tracks happening at once. So, yes, you do see plenty of news stories often sourced back to sports officials having this anxiety around women's sports. This idea that masculine women were succeeding, even potentially, men themselves were succeeding in women's sports, seemingly meaning cis men. Again, these were kind of all confused, it's a panic, it's all a little bit confused and not totally clear what anyone is saying.

Those often came from sports officials. The media often was covering sports officials. I think what is actually striking is that when you look at the totality of the coverage, a lot of newspapers-- In 1934, the South African sports official makes this accusation about the Women's World Games, and then you have other newspapers that then interview women athletes who participated in the games who are all like, this is ridiculous, and just like the idea that there's men in disguise or that there's some problem with masculine presenting women participating in the games, like other athletes were saying, this is so silly.

So I think you do see the media always being of two minds, depending on where you look. But there's always some sensationalism of it fits some larger narrative about women's sports at the time that women's sports was somehow subverting understandings of gender, and at the same time, you also had sort of athletes, people on the ground, people who were really there, who were like, this is ridiculous, I don't know where this is coming from.

Kousha Navidar: Eventually, Koebek medically transitioned after winning that gold medal, and at this point, he becomes a media sensation. People were scrutinizing his every move, and he became, like you said, kind of a local celebrity in Europe. We talked a lot about the negative coverage. Was there any positive coverage about Koebek at this time?

Michael Waters: Yes, there was a lot of positive coverage of him. I think that was actually what was so striking to me when I first stumbled across this story. Koebek wins gold in 1934. He actually kind of steps away from sports for a bit. Then in 1935, he starts seeing a doctor. When I read his memoir, which is where a lot of this is being sourced from, so he's always had these long-running questions about his own identity. He had older brothers, and growing up, he would always wear his older brother's clothes.

It's really not until 1935, when he steps away from sports, that he decides to really answer those questions for the first time. He starts seeing a doctor who agrees that he can transition. Then he announces to the press in November 1935 that going forward, he's going to be living as a man. He becomes a sensation in Europe and in the US as well. He's actually really widely covered in American papers.

I think what was striking to me is that there is this real empathy and curiosity about him that you see in a lot of the coverage. I should caveat to say, this is the 1930s. There was also a lot of sensationalism. Reporters were always confused about his pronouns. They maybe used words to describe his transition that would be offensive today.

Kousha Navidar: But there was this sense of empathy that you're talking about--

Michael Waters: Yes. Through all, you see this real curiosity about Koebek and about just this idea that these male and female categories are actually more permeable and less fixed than maybe the public had always assumed them to be.

Kousha Navidar: The reaction as well that you cover in the book has to do with sports doctors and what some in the sports industry then responded. There's Wilhelm Knoll, who is a big character in the book, and seeing some of the media outlets praise of Koebek angered him, in particular, a sports doctor, he was one of the architects of sex-testing in sports. Can you talk a little bit about Wilhelm? What did he think about Koebek's transition? What kind of sex-testing did Knoll institute?

Michael Waters: Like you said, Knoll was reacting to all of the coverage of Koebek that was quite positive and was really trying to understand how transition worked. Knoll wrote this op-ed in January 1936 right after Koebek announces that he's living as a man, basically calling for medical exams in women's sports. It's a bit strange on the face of it as to why this would happen. Koebek, once he decides to live as a man, says really openly, I want to play with other men. I want to play in men's sports. Knoll takes issue with the fact that Koebek had played in women's sports at all.

I think the most charitable reading of Knoll's op-ed that I can give is that I think he assumed that Koebek fit on some kind of intersex spectrum, which it's possible he did. We don't really know that for sure, and Knoll certainly didn't know that for sure. But based on the way he wrote, that seemed to be what he was referring to. So Knoll uses this to decry women's sports itself. And some important context for Knoll is that he's a really prominent sports doctor. He has the ear of the IOC, the Track and Field Federation, which is called World Athletics today. Because this was an era in which sports medicine was quite rudimentary, just being a prominent sports doctor gave you a lot of cachet.

He was also a registered Nazi, and I think you see that a lot in his writings about Koebek and his writings about other athletes. He wanted to cleanse, and he used that word, whole groups of athletes from sports. He included Jewish athletes, athletes of color, and I think you can see his resistance to Koebek into this idea of even masculine women potentially intersex women playing in women's sports as being some kind of extension of that.

So Knoll writes this op-ed, but then, I think, even more significantly, he later sends letters to these different sports federations calling for medical exams in women's sports. The IOC is kind of like the top of the governing structure of the Olympics, but beneath them are all sorts of individual sports federations, like the track and field federation or the federation that governs swimming, and they make decisions as well about eligibility policies. Knoll wrote letters to those different governing bodies, basically saying, we have to institute these medical exams, not really citing a reason. Again, the Koebek story doesn't even square with what he was arguing.

Kousha Navidar: So did sex-testing in sports exist before this, or was it really Knoll who introduced it?

Michael Waters: It didn't exist before this. There was one other call that I was able to find for sex-testing in 1934 by this Canadian sports writer, but it wasn't really taken that seriously. There were medical exams, or I should say there was a normal physical that was given to some athletes before the Olympics just to sort of check their health. So, it's possible that some of those things could have gotten conflated before then, but sex-testing didn't exist at the time. And there was no idea of, like, we need to literally measure and surveil people's bodies and decide who gets to play in women's sports and who does not. That was something that Knoll really popularized.

Kousha Navidar: And how did it look starting with Knoll and then kind of moving along the end of the century with sex-testing? Did it evolve in a certain way? Did it become more or less scientific?

Michael Waters: Yes. Well, so I should say that Knoll himself clearly didn't have a clear idea of who he was trying to go after. Again, he subscribed to eugenics. He made all these references to people he was trying to exclude but didn't actually really think seriously about. The human body is quite a spectrum. Which kinds of women was he saying? Which should not be eligible? What kinds of exams was he asking for? He didn't really spell that out.

So the first sex-testing policy, which is actually not passed by the IOC itself, but is only passed at first in 1936 by the Track and Field Federation. This policy is passed at the Berlin Olympics in August 1936 because Knoll had written this letter to them. It doesn't actually spell out who would not be eligible. It allows any woman competing in sports to lodge a protest against a competitor who they had "questions of a physical nature" about, which could really mean anything. It seemed to just refer to any woman who is deemed presenting as overly masculine could be given what was then a strip test. So they would just do a physical examination of the body. Again, they weren't spelling out what they were looking for, which women's bodies could be allowed to compete.

Kousha Navidar: Right. But then it moved to chromosomal testing from there, right?

Michael Waters: Yes. So that was just the origins. And then, eventually, those physical tests were also taken up in force in the 1950s and into the sixties, and then there was a lot of pushback to them, obviously, because they're not scientific and also quite invasive and cruel. And so the International Olympic Committee switches to chromosome testing, which also quickly got criticism because there are lots of people who don't just have x, y or xx chromosomes. There are lots of women who would identify as cis women who had a multiplicity of chromosomes. These are not neat binaries to cut through the human body.

Like what we call sex is this combination of different traits, there's no easy way to cleave these categories. So after the chromosome testing got a lot of pushback, the new standard that was introduced with this idea of hormone testing, which is to some extent still in effect today, but that was sort of more like the '90s into the 2000s. Then actually today, what has happened is that the IOC itself no longer sets an overarching policy.

Although in 2021, they did make this policy statement in which they said that they wanted to encourage inclusion for trans and intersex women in more sports. But instead, now it's up to the individual sports federations to make their own choices about who they're going to allow to compete. And then often in recent times, those have become quite restrictive policies.

Kousha Navidar: We have to go to a break shortly, but before we do, I want to ask you this one last question. We think about Knoll as the start of this sex-testing. He obviously passes away, the Nazi regime kind of falls, but then this idea of sex testing continues on through the 20th century, leading into the 21st. Do you have a sense of why there was this obsession over sex regulation and surveillance, why it continued on?

Michael Waters: Yes. I think, first of all, like, we've never really had a good conversation reconciling with just the diversity of the human body and just the fact that it's really hard to cleave people into categories. And for a long time, the policy has been just to push out intersex women and later trans women who were just harder for sports officials to deal with, rather than treating them with empathy, just to say that they can't compete.

I think part of this is just that these policies were on the books in the 1930s, and they just sort of felt inevitable, and no one really thought about what are we actually doing here and why, and who is this really serving? Then the small side answer is that a lot of these anxieties were ramped up during the Cold War. And then I think other things like doping in the popular consciousness became tied up with sex-testing, even though these are really different methods and ideas. I think a lot of the US USSR accusations of cheats, all of it became wrapped up during the Cold War. But, yes, we've just never had a [crosstalk] of what we were doing.

Kousha Navidar: And today, it continues to be obviously a big topic of discussion. We got to go to a quick break, but we're here with journalist Michael Waters, author of The Other Olympians. It's a biography of some of the earliest trans athletes in competitive sports. Right after the break, we're going to bring this conversation about gender surveillance and sex-testing in sports to the modern day. As Michael, you kind of so elegantly have already done for us, we're going to continue it with journalist Frankie de la Cretaz. That's up next. Stay with us.

[music]

Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar, in for Alison Stewart. We're talking about the history of gender surveillance and sex-testing in sports. Before the break, journalist Michael Waters traced this practice back to 1930s Europe, kind of took it up to the modern day. And now we look at how this fixation on policing gender and sex in sports looks today. To help us orient is Frankie de la Cretaz. They've written about trans and gender nonconforming athletes in all kinds of sports, from Olympic athletes to collegiate ultimate frisbee players to high school cheerleaders.

And Frankie's reporting echoes what Michael has demonstrated in his book, that trans and gender nonconforming athletes have been subjects of panic in society, and some of these athletes have been treated as either "unfit or unable to partake in sports" because they don't fit into societal definitions of man or woman in the eyes of sports federations, especially. Hi, Frankie. Welcome to all of it.

Frankie de la Cretaz: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. Thanks for joining us. And listeners, we want to bring you into the conversation as well, especially our trans and gender nonconforming listeners. Was your participation in sports impacted in some way because of your nonconforming gender identity. Maybe you transitioned and you couldn't play in your local sports league or your college team anymore. Or maybe you're a parent of a child who is trans or nonbinary and you have questions about how to include them in your local sports teams. Or if you're a sports coach and you've had to address some of these questions. We're here for your stories. 212-433-9692 is the number. That's 212-433-9692.

Frankie, in Michael's book, we learned about how gender surveillance morphed from invasive physical exams to chromosomal testing to hormone-based testing, which is, as Michael was saying, one of the most prominent forms of testing we see today. Can you tell us what was the IOC's longstanding policy around hormone testing?

Frankie de la Cretaz: Yes. So what a lot of people don't know, because I think we have all this talk about trans athletes, and particularly trans women, competing in the women's division. In the modern day, I think that's kind of where the conversation centers and it's often treated as this new phenomenon that a lot of people don't realize that under the IOC's policy, trans women have been explicitly allowed to compete since 2003. They have had a variety of policies over the years as they have adapted it.

The most well-known of those policies and the one that is still the most influential today, was put in place in 2015, and that measured testosterone levels. And so it said trans women could compete in the women's division if they had testosterone levels under a certain number. As Michael alluded to in 2021, the IOC pulled back and issued a guiding framework rather than a policy that fell to each individual sport. Many sports still have that policy in place, but there are others, like track and field and cycling and swimming, that put bands kind of essentially bands in place instead.

Kousha Navidar: Advocates were proponents for hormone testing, kind of what you're talking about. I believe it's, is it 10 nanomoles per liter? That is the level that is put into place. Is that right?

Frankie de la Cretaz: It is sport-dependent. That was the level for a long time. Many sports have brought that down to 5 or even 2. It's hard to answer because when we start to talk about this, the policies are so fractured and they are so different within sport to sport toasport, so it's hard to make those blanket statements.

Kousha Navidar: One thing that I was thinking about with that is, to your point, advocates were proponents for hormone testing and other forms of gender surveillance say it's meant to be a way to promote "fairness in sports". Can you walk us through that argument, that idea of fairness, and your thoughts on it?

Frankie de la Cretaz: Yes, sure. I think that the word fairness has become weaponized in women's sports, in particular against trans women or any women who don't conform to these sort of eurocentric beauty ideals or beauty standards. And I think when we talk about fairness, we are often framing it wrong. Often the question being asked, is it fair for cis women to have to compete against trans women? Instead of asking, is it fair for trans women to be denied access to something that should have a right to? I think a lot of people forget that access to sport, free from discrimination, is considered a human right from both the United Nations and the IOC's Olympic charter.

But also fairness gets really warped as well because sport in itself is not fair. You can talk about access to coaching and access to equipment and all kinds of other things, but the way that the concept of fairness is being weaponized, instead of centering the most marginalized athletes in the room, which is what we should be doing, it's being used against them.

Kousha Navidar: Michael, I'm wondering, as you're listening to Frankie's take on it and with your experience looking in history, what are your thoughts on this argument?

Michael Waters: I think it's something that you've seen come up in different ways for many decades without clear ideas of even-- I think the target of this sort of weaponization of fairness has shifted a lot, and I think it's significant of just how confused these policies have been for a long time. Also, just the fact that there are lots of different-- I think a great thing about the Olympics is that it brings together this diversity of athletes and diversity of bodies, this sort of spectrum of people and experience.

There are lots of things that we don't regulate because we can't, like Frankie said, like class, like if we're talking about basketball, heights of basketball players, even we're talking about hormone levels, and it's like the idea, if we're saying that testosterone confers an advantage, I think it's telling to see that we are not regulating that in men's sports, for instance, because men have the same natural variations of testosterone levels like women might. I do think that you see this persistent refusal to really wrestle with how complex the body is and how complex people are. And I think that's something that should be celebrated and not regulated in the way it has been.

Kousha Navidar: An argument you often hear, we all hear from people who don't want trans women competing in the same category as other women is kind of the assumption that they have an advantage over other women, a biological advantage. Frankie, what would you say to folks who make that claim?

Frankie de la Cretaz: Well, first of all, the science does not support that. There was a recent study that shows that in some ways, trans women might actually be at a disadvantage, and so I think it's something that we need to really study more. But at the same time, all elite athletes have some sort of biological advantage in whatever sport they play over their competitors. It's why they're elite. Elite athletes are kind of freaks of nature in a lot of ways. Their bodies can do things that most people cannot do, and we don't complain about biological advantages that Michael Phelps has with his wingspan and his webbed feet, or the height that Michael mentioned in terms of basketball players.

Those are all biological advantages in the sport that they play. But to me, I think what happens when we focus on the body of these athletes, when we look at their genitals or their chromosomes or their hormone levels, we are dehumanizing them. We are making them into their body parts, and we are taking away their humanity, and we make this issue about the biology of somebody's body, rather than the fact that it's a human rights issue and we lose the people at the center of it and how they are being impacted.

Kousha Navidar: You also argue that sex-testing policies in elite sports, which you just mentioned, have permeated all the way down to youth sports as well. I want to make sure we talk about the youth sports element of us. Can you tell us how this happened?

Frankie de la Cretaz: I think a really easy place to see this happen is when you look at the dozens of states in the US that have passed bans on trans kids competing in sports in a gender-affirming way. A lot of these bills have taken policies that were designed for the elite international level or the Olympic level and kind of just applied them at all levels of sport. We've flattened sport.

What is appropriate for an Olympic athlete is not going to be appropriate for a twelve-year-old. And instead of thinking critically about the difference between those things, I think a lot of people assume that A, because it's the Olympics, they're going to know what they're talking about and whatever their policy is going to be good even when it's not. And B, that they must be right about this thing and so we're just going to apply it.

So you end up with policies or bands that look at a twelve-year-old girl, a trans girl who's been on puberty blockers can compete, but if she starts her transition at 16, and then that's different and she can't do that. Or bills in some states that had proposed potential genital exams for children to make sure that they could compete. So we're looking at these policies that, A, have been declared to be this kind of sex-testing, by the way, all of these policies that we're even talking about have also been declared human rights violations by the UN, and so the fact that these policies exist at all should be appalling to people. But the idea that we would even propose things like genital exams or hormone tests on children should be really concerning to people.

Kousha Navidar: Michael, I'm wondering, I want to bring you in here. Does this echo anything that you found when you were researching your book, the way things are going?

Michael Waters: Yes. I do think you've sort of slowly seen this trickle down of this idea of sex-testing, I think was crystallized at the Olympics beginning in the 1930s. Then you've seen these policies trickle down for a long time, usually in this kind of invisible way. I think what has happened most recently is that there are these really explicit, cruel policies or bans being passed, like Frankie alluded to.

But even into the 1970s and eighties, like, when you go through the archive of these different sports organizations, there's plenty of evidence of young athletes who might fit on an intersex spectrum or something like that, who are being steered away from elite sports even many decades ago, because there was this idea of, like, well, you would never be able to compete in women's sports because of these policies.

I think for a long time they've had this really invisible impact on sports, and now we're seeing, especially in the US and especially on the state level, these really explicit, transphobic policies, really making explicit, I think, what has happened more quietly for many decades.

Kousha Navidar: I'm thinking of Title IX as well, Frankie, Title IX, the law that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. As of today, I think you had mentioned 25 states have banned transgender students from participating in sports, consistent with their gender identity. How are they getting around Title IX in that case?

Frankie de la Cretaz: Well, Title IX is interesting in a lot of ways because for all of the good that Title IX has done in providing access to sports for girls and women, it also is the thing that codified sex segregation into law. I think it's the thing that a lot of people look at and has made, I think, everyone think that maybe organizing sport by sex is the best way to organize sport when maybe it's not. We don't really know that.

Currently, many of the loudest voices who are trying to exclude trans women and girls from the women's division of sport are using Title IX to do so. They're twisting it because they are saying that trans women and girls are not actually women and girls. They'll often say they're biological males, and when they use that terminology, it then means they shouldn't be allowed to compete against women. So often you will hear this idea of protecting or saving women's sport being used against the trans girls and trans women who are trying to compete.

Kousha Navidar: Moving forward to take a macro look at it, especially with the Olympics right now, Frankie, what do you want organizations like the IOC and sports federations to do to become more inclusive? You had talked before about instead of doing it as a blanket testing, now sport by sport has options. Is that in the right direction? Is it misguided? What would you want to see change?

Frankie de la Cretaz: I think the answer here would be different depending on who you ask, but for me, over the course of all of my reporting and all of what I have seen, I have yet to see a case where trans women competing alongside other women has been an issue in a negative way. The only negative thing that is ever painted is that they happen to win. And so I don't know that competing in sport means you just have-- You can compete as long as you don't win, isn't fair either.

But from a safety perspective and an access perspective and a fairness perspective, there has not been a problem. These are all reactionary policies to a problem that does not exist. And so for me, I would say that sports should err on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion. You can look at when you see the international governing body for cycling, when they put their ban in place, they have some language around it that says, we don't really have enough evidence either way to support or not support this ban, but we're going to err on the side of caution and ban trans women.

I think that is the reverse of what we should be doing. We should be erring on the side of inclusion until someone can prove that that is not the right way to go, but other than that, there's no reason to ban people from competition.

Kousha Navidar: So just like for you, that idea question before we talked about with reframing the idea of fairness, for you, it's reframing this idea of inclusion and of the ways in which we view sports as both a human right but also as following the science, not having any determining factor one way or the other. Is that fair summary of what you said?

Frankie de la Cretaz: Yes.

Kousha Navidar: And Michael, for you, is there any hope for trans and gender nonconforming athletes today that you've seen? Where do you find hope? When do you feel the most optimistic?

Michael Waters: I think conversations like this in reading reporters like Frankie, who's just so good at what they do, I find hope in that, and just like that kind of coverage. I think having a conversation about these athletes that acknowledges, like Frankie said, their humanity and just the immense skill that it takes to even get to the point where you could maybe qualify for the Olympics, I think that is where I find most hope. It's like in writers who are doing this work and sort of athletes themselves who are talking about the impacts of these policies. I just hope we can continue sort of conversation like this that center the athletes first.

Kousha Navidar: We'll have to pause it there for time, but we've been discussing the century-long history of sex-testing and gender surveillance in sports, all the way from its origins in 1930s Europe to today. Our guests have been journalists Michael Waters, the author of The Other Olympians, which is a biography of some of the earliest trans athletes in competitive sports. We've also been joined by Frankie de la Cretaz. Thank you both for joining us so much.

Michael Waters: Thank you for having us.

Frankie de la Cretaz: Yes, thank you.

 

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