Aug 28

Aug 28 The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports

About the book

Author: Michael Waters
Publisher: FSG

More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.

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Bookshop.org (print or ebook) | Libro.fm (audio)

My Review

Trans rights are women’s rights.

This is an incredibly researched, empathetically rendered, deeply poignant look at the ways the oppression of women and the oppression of trans people arose together at the advent of women’s sports and the 1936 Olympics that took place in Nazi Germany. It’s eerily relevant to this exact moment, between the rise of fascism here in the US and the recent announcement that women Olympians will now need to submit to genetic testing to confirm their gender. I learned so much, and I am about to shove this book into everyone’s hands. (I also listened to the vast majority of it on audio, and I think it worked great.)

I won’t lie, I often felt disheartened while reading this book — if a nationwide movement to have the US boycott the 1936 Olympics BECAUSE NAZIS WERE MURDERING JEWISH PEOPLE was no match for one clever and determined antisemitic white man administrator, what will we do today? If these men continue to insist on policing women and trans people’s bodies for the show of it, and their momentum is this great, how will we stop it?

But at the end of the day, this is the truth: Gender testing didn’t work back then, and it isn’t going to work now. And this book does a great job of showing why that is.