Podcast Transcription: Michael Waters

May 29

May 29 Podcast Transcription: Michael Waters

This episode, Events Director Amali (she/her) interviewed Michael Waters (he/him) to discuss his forthcoming debut book The Other Olympians, which explores the origins of the fight for trans rights within the world of international sports amidst the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe.

The two discuss queer history, homoeroticism in sports, and their favorite Olympic events.

Amali

Today to celebrate Pride Month and to prepare for next month's Summer Olympics, I'm joined by Michael Waters, whose debut book, The Other Olympians, is publishing this month from FSG. The book follows the stories of some of the first trans and queer athletes, including Zdeněk Koubek and Mark Weston, some of the first trans and queer athletes to compete and to gain recognition on the international stage of the Olympics and amidst the rise of fascism and Nazism in 1930s Europe.

This book is so fascinating and Michael is an incredible writer and historian whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, among many other places. Welcome Michael. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Michael Waters

Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm very excited.

Amali

Yeah, we're really excited to get into it. So just to get started, I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about the inspirations, the impetus behind this book. Yeah, where did it come from and how long has it been in the making?

Michael Waters

So I think I'm coming at this book a little bit more from, maybe a queer history angle, even a sports angle in the first place. I've always been interested in history generally, and especially queer history. And so a lot of my work before this book has been kind of about often finding these pockets of queer community that existed in, especially in time periods and in places that we don't really expect them. So the thing about the queer past that intrigues me is that I think it's just not as linear as we think it is. It's not necessarily this really clean story of progress from Stonewall until, maybe in recent years, there's been more of a backlash. And I think actually, when you look at the early 20th century, for instance, there was in some ways a lot of possibilities around queerness and around gender that kind of disappeared later.

And so, when trying to find interesting people to write about – I subscribe to newspapers.com, which is this digital newspaper archive, which is an incredible resource. And just truly searched around different keywords related to gender and sexuality and filter for certain decades. And while doing one of those searches, I stumbled across this reference to these two athletes, Zdenek Koubek and Mark Weston, who had transitioned gender in the 1930s. And you know, from the newspaper articles, I was like, “wow, they, you know, they got a lot of coverage at the time, they must have been relatively famous.” And then just kind of assumed that they would be, you know, widely documented today and then was pretty surprised just at how little they were remembered given the sort of the vastness of press attention on them at the time. And really what drove my interest in this book in the first place was not just that Weston and Zdeněk Koubek were covered a lot in the press, but also that there was the way that they were covered was with this sense of really intense curiosity. So they transitioned in 1935 and 1936. And then there were these newspaper articles that were trying to explain to a public that wasn't well versed in these things, what a gender transition was and how that was possible, like how you could move between these categories like that. And there was definitely some sensationalism, like when you actually read the text of these newspaper articles, but there was also this overwhelming curiosity. People just wanted to know what was possible and were just really intrigued by these two athletes. I first found this in early 2021, so reading that against the backdrop of just incredible anti-trans policies, I mean, across the US, but like, even when you just look at sports and at the Olympics there's so many anti-trans intersex policies. And the way that these athletes are covered is not with that same sense of curiosity, but is from this sense of skepticism and, at worst, just pure hatefulness. And so that was really the driving question of this book for me is like, “how do we get from this point where these early trans athletes were covered with such curiosity to where we are today?”

Amali

Yeah, no, the difference in those words, “curiosity” versus “now”, this contention, this fear, this hatred, right, that so many, you know, reporters and whoever, you know, are writing about trans athletes often. The difference in those sentiments is so key to me. And that was something that definitely shocked me a little bit when I was reading this book. And I'm curious if you think because, you know, the 1930s (the 20s and 30s) I would say is such an interesting, you know, mid war era where people are recovering from WWI, they're recovering from The Great Depression, and there's this way that these athletes are interacting with their own bodies, categories and things like that. That's, I don't know, that's really interesting to me.

Michael Waters

Yeah, I mean, if you're talking about this interwar period when it relates to queerness too, I think, the 1920s especially was a big period for queer community in a lot of major cities. There are a lot of scholars who have documented this, like, I think most famously, like, George Chauncey has this book called Gay New York, which talks about New York in the 1920s and about how drag shows in Harlem, for instance, were these incredibly popular, even tourist sites in the 20s. But then also, if anyone is familiar with the movie Cabaret, for instance, that's 1920s Berlin. And there was in this period, in these major cities especially, this potentiality of queerness. And it starts to erode a little bit in the 30s, but I think with the way that Weston and Koubek were covered, you can still see a lot of that sense of so much possibility in gender and biological sex and sexuality still on the minds of people that I think is really unique to this interwar period. And then you kind of start to see [it] fade out by World War II and the decade after.

Amali

Yeah, 100%. And I mean, there's also, in a way, this inherent queerness to the Olympics itself. And I really loved how you talked about like, in the early years of the Olympics, the like, the “machoism” that it came from and this idea that, “we're gonna plan this international sporting event to weed out the strongest and the most athletic people in our societies,” but then these athletes kind of flip that on its head in a way.

And I don't know, I was wondering what your thoughts are on that and the queerness of sports in general, like wrestling and running and, I don't know, there's something in there and especially I feel like right now there's this big cultural phenomenon happening with Love Lies Bleeding and all of these kind of new queer, not necessarily sports movies, but these queer cultural moments that are so tied into our physical bodies and how they interact with each other.

Michael Waters

For sure. I think there's definitely something inherently queer about sports, both from a sexuality and gender standpoint.

Amali

Mm hmm.

Michael Waters

I mean, as you're talking about it, the whole idea of that kind of fixation on your body and on working on and sculpting and melding your body is very queer, has resonances with a trans experience, I think. And then similarly, just the competition itself. I mean, to throw in a movie like Challengers, there is something very homoerotic, too, about the ways in which athletes are competing against each other and the ways in which a lot of sports are structured. I think that kind of went over the head of, you know, a lot of the early founders of the modern Olympics, they weren't really thinking along those lines.

Amali

Yeah, definitely.

Michael Waters

But I do think it is cool to actually trace back the literal queerness in these sports and the literally queer people who are in these sports, because I think it just kind of makes sense that these athletes would be cropping up and have just maybe been forgotten by history and the intervening decades. But yeah, it definitely validates this idea that I think many people have, which is there is something very gay, very trans about sports and athletics, just in and of itself.

Amali

Yeah, definitely. And I mean, the research that you did for this book feels so, so vast.

I want to read one short little passage from early on in the book where you're talking about the chaos of the early Olympics and how much of a shit show some of them were.

You write:
“Runners, dehydrated and often intoxicated, had a habit of collapsing in the middle of races. Temporary structures erected for visitors sometimes caved in, athletes arrived late to their competitions late, others were known to quit the race halfway through to sit at a cafe.”

That's just hilarious to me, but also, you know, kind of makes sense when you think about it. But I'm just curious, in your research, what were some of the most surprising facts or stories that you came across that have really stuck with you throughout this?

Michael Waters

I definitely think the sort of the chaos of the early Olympics, I did not expect to encounter, but I think it's sort of really telling in a lot of ways about like, some of the policies that were passed that we still live with today.

There's actually this story of this athlete who's sort of chased off track by this pack of dogs in the middle of this Olympic sprint–

Amali

Yeah! That's the next sentence after I stopped reading! Ha ha!

Michael Waters

You would. Yeah, and then you would also have I think similar in that section, you would also have athletes who were literally drinking brandy and whiskey before events because there was so little understanding of you know, what to have before a sports game. Sports science itself was incredibly rudimentary at the time. And I do actually think understanding sort of the chaos of the early Olympics is also instructive for understanding why some of the policies like sex testing in this case, which is the focus of my book, why they were so poorly thought through in the first place. This wasn't necessarily the well-oiled machine that we think of it as today.

There was this element of confused bureaucrat, I think, that was organizing these events and creating these policies. And you know, some things we've improved upon and some and other things like sex testing just have continued in different forms up until the present without really any real effort to remove or fix those policies. I don't know if this is as shocking on the face of it, but one other sort of series of threads that I found fascinating while researching this book that I didn't expect at all was Koubek, who is this Czech athlete who transitions gender, his story intersected with so many other famous people. And I was especially charmed by [discovering] in 1936, he became really famous, and he was actually invited to New York to perform on Broadway. And so you have these incredible articles in the New York Daily News covering his step-by-step exploration of New York City. And you have him as this kind of Broadway star for a couple of months at the end of 1936. And then he even goes to France and performs alongside Josephine Baker. And it's stories like that that I found really exciting. This sort of forgotten athlete who meant so much to so many people at the time would literally be like linking up with people as famous, and as impactful as well, as someone like Josephine Baker. So yeah, I mean, I just like, I kind of loved and didn't expect coming across stories like that.

Amali

The question on everyone’s mind after reading The Other Olympians is “which Olympic event is the gayest?”

Here’s Bex with their thoughts.

Bex

So everyone thinks it’s figure skating, but I actually think archery is the gayest. I just feel it. I don’t really have any facts or reasons, but it seems right.

Amali

And here’s Sarah Jane.

Sarah Jane

I think it’s probably synchronized diving because after they finish their dives together they get to hang out in the hot tub and warm up.

Jules

Hey guys, this is Jules, editor of the podcast. I have one thing to share and then we’ll get back to the rest of the interview.

So, Amanda Montell. You know her, you love her. Friend of the pod, author of the New York Times bestselling book The Age of Magical Overthinking, and host of the Sounds Like A Cult podcast. She’s got a new show for all of the thought-spiralers out there!

It’s called Magical Overthinkers and every other week she’s going to interview an oh-so smart and oh-so cool expert guest about a buzzy subject from the zeitgeist. From extreme nostalgia to imposter syndrome, to celebrity worship, to people who rely on Mercury when it comes to their decision-making. Every episode is going to be packed with thought-provoking conversations, and actionable takeaways for how chronically online listeners can get out of their own heads. (I’m going to have to listen to that one for sure.)

Magical Overthinkers airs every other Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts. And honestly, while you’re at it, we interviewed her for this podcast, so go back and listen to that one!

Michael Waters

The founder of the modern Olympics saw the Olympics in these kind of contradictory, to me, terms which is at once he described it as this way to sort of create diplomatic relations between countries. So his idea was that, you know, “if we get all these countries to participate in sports together, in theory that would sort of lower the possibility that there would be armed conflict between them.” I don't think that theory is really held true. Obviously, he said this in the 1890s. And like, you know, a lot's happened since then. And then at the same time, so he said that and then at the same time, he also sort of had these like, underlying nationalist aims for doing sports. He was inspired to start the Olympics because of this French army defeat, basically, and he saw this defeat as proof that young French men weren't properly fit or weren't properly masculine. Getting them to do sports would be a way to sort of strengthen and almost like militarize them.

So it's like, I think the Olympics, when it comes to its status in diplomacy and international relations, has always sort of embodied this conflicting vision of what it should be. It both promotes the prowess of individual countries, and at the same time, I think it super-portrays itself as being a tool of diplomacy, which is just a conflict that's never been resolved. And so I think when you see the Olympics used in those contexts, it feels contradictory and confusing, I think, because it kind of always has been. And yeah, I mean, this is a little bit less on the international diplomacy stage, but the other sort of legacy of the Olympics that I am focusing on in the book is specifically around sex testing. I think the thing that I was trying to show with this book when I was talking about the IOC and then other sports federations that sort of exists under the IOC is really to show the ways in which all of these decisions are just made by people and made by bureaucrats. I think you see a policy and you assume that it's always been there for a reason. And I really wanted to show the process through which those policies came into being to really denaturalize the bureaucracy behind it. And I think that's so true for sex testing, especially because you know, for so long, there have been these policies on the books at the Olympics that have limited the ability of intersex and trans athletes, and especially intersex and trans women to participate in sports.

It can kind of feel almost like it's always been there, can feel almost intrinsic to how women's sports are governed. But you can actually trace back that decision to create this policy in which people would be sorted into these categories of male or female, you can trace that to a decision that was made in 1936. And so that's what a lot of my book is trying to do. And I think when you trace that back to 1936, you can see that a lot of the people pushing for sex testing in the first place, first of all, it wasn't really a popular request from the public, there wasn't – you know, like when Kovac and Weston transitioned gender they were met, like we said, with a sense of curiosity. There wasn't actually people calling for sex testing or for there to be curbs. It was really this small group of sports officials who thought that there was a problem. And one of the most prominent proponents of sex testing, it turned out, is this doctor who was also a registered Nazi, this German doctor named Wilhelm Knoll, and he was the main person who was writing letters to all of these sports federations after Kovac transitioned, basically saying, “this is a problem, we need to start instituting these medical exams in women's sports.” Even though Kovac had expressed no desire to participate in women's sports ever again, he was out living as a man, he wanted to play in men's sports. That didn't really matter. And basically what happens in 1936 is that the IOC considers sex testing and then ultimately decides not to pursue a policy directly. And they kind of kick the issue down to the individual sports federations. And so basically every kind of group of sports has its own governing body. And so the track and field governing body was called the IAAF at the time. It's now called World Athletics. And they in August 1936 passed this very confused early version of sex testing policy really at the behest of Wilhelm Knoll, this sort of Nazi sports doctor. And that's when you see sex testing first appear on the world stage and exactly what sex testing means has changed a lot. It started with these really grotesque physical searches and then moved into chromosome testing, into testosterone testing more recently. Now it's like once again, kind of a jumble.

But yeah, I mean, I think by seeing where this policy came from, you can also see, the ideologies at play. The fact that this was passed and codified by people who had fascist beliefs, in some cases, who at the very least did not care to think about the nuances of the body or of gender or biological sex. They just weren't concerned in creating a spirit of inclusion. And so ever since anyone who advocates for inclusion in sports and at the Olympics, has been just kind of on the back foot because of this policy that was passed by this very specific group of people in 1936. And I think that's just important to see that these policies are not an inherent part of how sports have to function. This was a choice that was made. And, I do think we've just been living out the consequences of that choice ever since. And it's, I think once something is enshrined into policy, it's just hard to undo it. It just puts you on the back foot to do anything about it.

Amali

That's really, really fascinating. I feel like this kind of desire to do exactly what you're doing and kind of show just the people, the actual people making decisions behind these things that play out, you know, on huge, huge scales. It makes me think about, you know, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s novel, Chain Gang All Stars, which, this is fiction, but it does a similar thing where it goes behind the scenes and to the people who have created this program, the people who are creating all of the sponsorships, et cetera. And I think that that is just really fascinating. And when looking at history specifically in these policies that have been enacted and that we've just followed kind of blindly for decades and decades. And, you know, it's like the longer we continue to accept them, the stronger, the more difficult it is to push back or to kind of try to restructure it.

Yeah, I'm really curious. I mean, when thinking about the format of this book and how you kind of had to juggle, doing this storytelling of these athletes lives while also juggling these more bureaucratic sections, talking about policies, talking about sports federations and all of those very specific details, what was kind of your outlining process like for that? What was kind of in the forefront of your mind, you know, trying to maintain a balance between looking at these specific characters and looking at, you know, the story at large?

Michael Waters

Yeah, I think when it comes to the bureaucracy of how the Olympics functions, that was definitely a challenge, which is: bureaucracy is boring, just kind of inherently. And I think often that is like a way for these bureaucracies, and especially I think sports bureaucracies, to get away with a lot, which is, it's really hard to make the inner workings of how policy is packed compelling. And it's also very confusing. I struggled with this. There's so much sort of interplay between the IOC and these sports federations, and then these world sports federations, and then there's also interplay with national sports federations. There are these many layers of bureaucracy at play, and it is a very hard thing to narrativize.

And I am kind of a stubborn historian, I guess, because the harder it was to make compelling on the page I guess the harder I pushed to make sure that I could find a way that gets across to readers really what was happening without – sort of capture all the nuances of how bureaucracy works, while still making it at least not terrible to read on the page, because I do think it's important to really engage with how these systems work. And even just who is behind these systems.

So another, meaningful fact from the book is that, like the IOC itself in the 1930s, and earlier, it wasn't just populated by our representation of the countries who participate in the Olympics. It was populated by this incredibly privileged group of men, entirely men, until the 1980s. The IOC at one point was largely aristocratic men who had descended from landed classes in Europe, or people who owned these huge businesses. It wasn't necessarily people who had any expertise in sports. Some played sports, but I also think that's important to articulating the bureaucracy is to show that like the people who are populating it are also not really people who are connected to, you know, the stories of these athletes who are transitioning gender, for instance, or whatever it is, they're not really at that ground level.

I wanted to do the best I could to tease out the bureaucracy and who was in it and how they made those choices. And to fit it into this kind of narrative that I was telling you about Koubek and Weston, just because I think that these institutions can get away with a lot in part because it's so hard to untangle what is going on with them. And especially when it comes to the history of sports bureaucracy. I wanted it to feel really apparent and even visceral to readers what these federations were doing when they were talking about sex testing in the 1930s.

Amali

Yeah, it comes through really, really clearly. And I mean, even just that skill to make these policies legible, even just organizing all the different sports organizations in a way that makes sense, like that alone is extremely skillful.

I'm curious what other books, nonfiction or fiction, were you reading or were you looking to as inspiration while working on this?

Michael Waters

I think there's like a couple different categories of those. There are some books that have approached similar topics that I was reading a lot, like books about the Olympics. There's this historian named Lindsay [Parks] Pieper, who has this book called Sex Testing, which is a thorough survey of sex testing policies in sports up until the present. And so that was like a really foundational text that I looked at a lot. There's this author named Jules Boykoff, who has written a lot about the IOC and about Pierre de Coubertin, who's the founder of the IOC. [Boykoff] has done a great job for a long time documenting just how the Olympics functions and how that bureaucracy functions. So that's kind of on the sports end of things.

I was also looking at trans history books like by Jules Gill-Peterson. Speaking of Jules Gill-Peterson, I did just read A Short History of Transmisogyny, her most recent book, which I thought was an incredible work of history and I think does a really admirable thing of going back pretty far in time to show the history and the origins of transmisogyny, but also sort of show like these moments in which trans women or people who might classify themselves as trans women today were covered going back into the 1800s, which is no easy feat.

And another book that I think is a little more academic, but that I really love is this book, Sex Is as Sex Does by Paisley Currah. And it's a little bit more academic, but I think it's like so smart on fury. And so basically he is talking about kind of the meaning of the sex category when it comes to government bureaucracies, and sort of how that that definition of sex has changed, and is kind of at the whim of governments themselves He talks about like the DMV and how the DMV’s desire to change someone's sex marker has changed over time. And there's so many different sort of reasons related to gay marriage and surveillance that influence the meaning of this sex category itself. I love that book, because I think he does the best job of anyone of denaturalizing a bureaucracy and explaining how this thing that we call sex only has meaning in so far as bureaucracies give it meaning. And yeah, I mean, he's just an incredibly smart scholar. So I would also recommend that.

Amali

Yeah, that's fantastic. Thank you.

And I have to ask, do you have a favorite Olympic event?

Michael Waters

That's a good question. I mean, I have always liked the bobsled racing. I'm not sure that there's any sort of academic reason why, I just think it's fun to look at.

What about you? Do you have a favorite Olympic event?

Amali

Okay, I really love gymnastics and synchronized diving specifically.

Michael Waters

Yeah, those are impressive.

Amali

Like the pairs when they dive at the same time and they have to be totally in sync. I could watch that all day long.

Michael Waters

I think the synchronized ones are great because, especially if you are not versed in the sport, it's pretty easy for you to see if someone was in sync or not. It's nice when you're clearly like “this was right.”

Amali

Yes, yes, they hit the water at the same time and neither of them did a belly flop, which is what I would do.

Michael Waters

Exactly! It’s like, “great job!”

Amali

Thank you again, Michael, for joining us today. Everyone should look out for The Other Olympians hitting bookshelves June 4th. It's so fascinating, it's so riveting. I could go on and on. But yeah, thank you so much, Michael, for sitting down and talking about it with us today.

Michael Waters

Thank you for asking me. I really appreciate it.

You can get your copy of The Other Olympians right here!

Sources Mentioned:

The Other Olympians by Michael Waters

Trans Czechoslovakian track athlete Zdeněk Koubek

Trans British athlete Mark Weston

The historic Stonewall Riots

An online hub for historical newspapers, newspapers.com

Gay New York by George Chauncey

The 1972 musical film Cabaret based on the Broadway musical by the same name

The 2024 film Love Lies Bleeding