Will I love The Other Olympians?

With both fascism and attacks on transgender people on the rise in the United States and globally, it’s easy to become paralyzed with dread.

This book is a crucial antidote to freezing from fascism-induced fear. In this book, Michael Waters deftly traces the experiences of courageous trans and intersex athletes from the 1930s who embraced their true selves despite public pushback. And Waters delivers these stories with silky prose; this a nonfiction book that slides down the brain hatch like a novel.

It began with the Nazis. This is perhaps the most important thing to know about sex testing for women athletes. "The Other Olympians" traces the roots of athletic sex testing for women, which began at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin by the Nazi regime because of sexist and eugenicist paranoia about sex and gender. Michael Waters, a strong storyteller, shows that when two high-profile athletes transitioned their gender, women Olympians—but not men—had to “prove” their gender through physical exams. This practice continued through the end of the twentieth century and was succeeded by hormone and genetic testing. To anyone concerned… show more.