Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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Zdeněk Koubek had just set a new world record in the 800-meter run at a major track meet in London
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A year after Koubek won gold, he told the world that he intended to live as a man. He received surgery to affirm his gender, masculinized his name, and attempted to change the sex marker on his ID. Koubek introduced many around the world to the very idea of changing sexes. But when Koubek beat the field in the 800-meter, he was still living as a woman, competing as a woman, and was simply a stronger runner than the South African or Canadian athletes. If you don’t remember Koubek’s story, that’s because it was largely lost to history. Koubek won the Women’s World Games, a now-defunct sports competition, in 1934, representing Czechoslovakia, a now-defunct country. Not long after he announced his transition in 1935, war broke out, and Nazi Germany invaded and occupied parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938.
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history dispels the myth that the current panic about trans athletes is a new one—it has haunted sports for generations, as fascism and nationalism helped birth the very idea of gender surveillance in athletic competition.
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The traits that we are quick to assign men and women—such as XY and XX chromosomes—collapse as useful markers once we acknowledge genetic diversity, and hormone levels can’t determine gender either. The decisions made by states to police gender, then, have never been rooted in science.
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Rushing to pass something before the games, the Olympic committee announced a rule allowing people to challenge the gender of a competitor, who would then have to undergo a sex test. This rule was “the birth of a regime of gender surveillance in sports,” Waters writes, and would become the basis for decades of unscientific, invasive, and humiliating sex testing that persisted into the 1990s.
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Take, for example, Caster Semenya, who twice won Olympic gold medals for the 800-meter—the same race that Koubek mastered—but has been attacked for most of her career because her body naturally produces more testosterone than most women. But the symmetry I kept coming back to while reading the book is that both now and then, right-wingers and fascists used the cases of a few athletes to incite panic and implement regressive policies that hurt both trans and cis athletes. The backlash to Koubek hurt him and Helen Stephens in the same way that the backlash to the swimmer Lia Thomas is hurting plenty of cis and trans women and girls today.
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This fomenting anti-trans backlash came to a head last week at the 2024 Paris Olympics, when Algerian boxer Imane Khelif beat her Italian counterpart Angela Carini, who quit after 46 seconds and said she had never been hit harder in her life.
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Nobody criticizing Khelif seemed to care that she was born a woman, identifies as a woman, had been cleared by the International Olympic Committee to compete, and hails from a country where it’s illegal to transition genders.
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What makes the fury particularly disingenuous is that it only came now that Khelif is winning. When she lost in the quarterfinals at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, her current critics didn’t bat an eye.